


Taako Taaco Has A Heart

by stvrkey



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Adventure Zone (Balance), The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, Angst with a Happy Ending, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Disaster Twins, Gen, It's always Lup and Taako week!, Magic and Science, Marvel Universe
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-12
Updated: 2019-06-01
Packaged: 2020-01-11 23:19:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 37,709
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18434192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stvrkey/pseuds/stvrkey
Summary: Lup and Taako Taaco are the youngest, richest CEO's in the world. Billionaire industrialists, genius inventors, they divide their time equally between partying and designing weapons for the Faerunian government. When Lup goes missing while demonstrating the Phoenix Fire Missile in Zakhara, Taako has to find her, no matter what the cost.Iiiiiiit's the Adventure Zone Iron Man AU you didn't know you were waiting for!





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I rechaptered this because I want to post as I go with the next half!
> 
> Also, this is an Iron Man TAZ AU, so trigger warnings for everything that entails!

_The Wizard_ by Black Sabbath pours out of the windows of the iridescent limo as it speeds along the freeway outside Goldcliff. The sun pours back in, and Taako lounges in the baking heat, gesturing his cocktail glass a little wildly as he attempts to refute Lup’s terrible opinions vis a vis the best way to establish VTOL flight-ready aircrafts, and also her _ugly as sin_ khaki shirt.

“Just because you’re going to be living in squalor for the next week doesn’t mean you have to blend with locals, Lulu. The 90s called, and you know what they said? They don’t even want their clothes _back_! They just said to _burn them_.”

“Listen, okay, it’s- It’s thematic- It’s in keeping with the-”

“The theme of being ugly? The ugly theme? The theme where you want to make your- your whole body look like grass and _dirt_? That theme? That the theme you were shooting for there, sister mine?”

“I can’t, I cannot believe I’m getting ragged on by a grown man who wears a sleepy sack. A goddamn _growbag_ , I-”

“Yes but I have never let one _scrap!_ One _millimeter_ of faux camo fabric touch my body, and do you know why?” He takes a noisy slurp of his cocktail. It has five umbrellas in it, because he fucking loves cocktail umbrellas. “It’s because I have _standards_.”

Lup steals one of his tiny umbrellas, smacks away his retaliatory grasping hand, ignores his yelp, and sticks it behind her ear, giving him a smug grin. Then she narrows her eyes and leans in close, “You wouldn’t know standards if they climbed into your sleepy sack and bit you on the ass, babe.”

“Okay, so we’re gonna do this now, huh? You’re gonna come for my sleepy sack? You think I’m like, you think I’m proud of this? I can’t even have a decent one-night-stand cause all through the afterglow I’m thinking about how my legs have too much wingspan. It is _hell_ , okay?”

Lup howls with laughter, “Oh my god, Ko. A pillowy hell!”

Honestly, Taako hasn’t had to get the ol’ sleepy sack out since he was nine, when he and Lup were separated briefly by their parents under the guise of ‘learning to be individuals’. Lup, who is an octopus disguised as a Forbes _30 Under 30 Luminary_ , is so much more effective than a growsack for banishing night terrors. The woman’s grip rivals the metalworking vice they use to hold up their cars.

“What does this stupid trip even, like, entail?” Taako asks, eyes on the road outside.

“I go for a tour of the camp, dazzle the rabble, schmooze some folks out of their cash, demo the missile, schmooze some more folks, then home!” says Lup, eyes on Taako, voice light. “ _Shimples_.”

“That’s a lot of schmoozing, are you sure you’re up to it?”

“I’m a great shmoozer,” huffs Lup, “Ask anyone.”

“Uhuh,” mumbles Taako, sipping his cocktail, “Sure, I’ll remember that the next time you threaten to set the board of directors on fire. To their _faces_.”

“They don’t deserve my schmooze,” mutters Lup wrathfully.

Lup and Taako have been in almost constant semi-warfare with the board since they were sixteen and old enough to inherit their shares in the company. They think the board is too conservative, too risk averse, and far too obsessed with the bottom line at the end of the tax year, instead of long term goals and daring new ideas. The board thinks that Lup and Taako are flight risks who are going to bring the company to its knees, in spite of the fact that real net profits have more than doubled since they came of age and started doing more interesting things than just selling weapons. Taaco Ventures is the biggest technological company in the world, their grandfather _invented the TV_ , they don’t need a gang of crusty old men telling them how to run the empire they were born into.

“We’re almost there, guys,” says Klarg.

“Good, get this woman out my car,” says Taako, “I regret every mitosis-meiosis misstep in my origins that produced this camo-covered disaster.”

Klarg, their huge driver-slash-bodyguard, glances back with a warm smile. “Anything I can get you before you go, Ms Taaco? Some oolong?”

“Nah, thanks babe. I’m all oolonged up.”

“Where’s my oolong?” demands Taako. “I thought _I_ was your favourite, Klarg. No, it’s fine, bring the ‘trayal. I can cope.”

“You’re both my favourites,” says Klarg, a tried and true answer since he’d first met them, aged twelve, newly orphaned and feral.

“Mhmm,” Taako hums, “A likely story.”

They roll to a stop on the hot tarmac. Heat pours off the ground, distorting the air in the middle distance and shimmering round the wheels of the Boeing Business jet, parked waiting for them on the runway. Klarg gets out and opens the door for them. Taako drains his glass and sets it on top of the mini fridge before following Lup out the door.

Lup throws her arms around Klarg’s neck and he straightens to his full height, leaving Lup’s Gucci sneakers dangling off the ground. Klarg looks a little teary as he kisses her on the head. “You’ll be careful?” he says, “You’ll do what you’re told? Let the professionals keep you safe?”

Lup laughs, tossing her long blonde hair over her shoulder. “Klarg, in all the years you’ve known me, when have I ever done as I’m told?” Then her smile, in response to Klarg’s worried look, softens. “Don’t worry babe, my missile is the only thing worth worrying about out there, and the only one driving that baby is _me_.”

“You weigh less than a buck fifty Lulu, maybe you should be worrying about strong breezes,” drawls Taako.

Lup narrows her eyes at him - as if trying to remind him, by force of her glare alone, that the last time they sparred together she threw him ten feet. Even with the subsequent concussion, he’s unlikely to forget that in a hurry.

His sister pats Klarg on the shoulder and Klarg turns away to hand her luggage to the flight attendants, before either of the twins can comment on the tears leaking from his eyes. Klarg’s always been terrible about letting his baby chicks out of the nest.

Lup springs off towards the jet, and Taako trails after her, flipping his purple iridescent shades down to cover his eyes.

“I’ll bring you back a camo sleepy sack!” Lup shouts over the noise of the engines, turning back towards him, “I’ll get it made special!”

“Don’t even bother!” Taako shrieks back, waving his phone at her, “I’m emancipating myself from you, I’m literally getting the locks changed as we speak!”

“You really should have considered this kind of sitch, before you linked all the locking mechanisms in the tower to our DNA. Or better yet, before you decided to _copy_ my genetic code like a lazy lazy plagiariser!”

“That’s not how genetics works!” Taako howls over the scream of turbines, “And even if it _was_ how they work, _I’m the older twin_!”

“No one will ever believe you,” Lup shouts, and she’s right, goddamnit. It’s public fucking record that Taako was first to take the dive from their mom’s ute, and yet one of the most enduring paparazzi myths regarding the Taaco Twins - and there are a _very very_ many - is that Lup is the eldest.

Lup grins cause she knows she’s got him. “I’m suing you for copyright infringement!” she bellows at Taako, “My genes are patent protected ya know!”

The wind bats his plait around and the back of his purple Armani suit flaps like wings behind him. Lup is holding tight to her terrible faux army cap. She ascends the first few steps to the jet, excitement propelling her onward, before she turns back to face him one last time, and hesitates. They don’t like talking about it, because they wouldn’t be Taacos if they were capable of open, honest conversation about their feelings, but they don’t like being apart. It’s rare for them to go twenty-four hours without seeing each other, and Taako honestly can’t remember the last time they’d gone a whole five days flying solo.

Even when they’d been children, and their father had made the now infamously poor decision to try and make his inseparable progeny grow as individuals, they’d been together again by day four. This, incidentally, was the day that Lup burned down the wooden gazebo in the back garden of their mother’s summer home, screaming the whole time that she wanted Taako back. Not to be outdone, Taako had shot down the Swarovski chandelier in the dining room of the Neverwinter mansion with a souped-up nerf gun, then barricaded himself in the dumbwaiter and refused to come out for anyone but Lup. They were grounded for the entire year, but they were together again, and that was all that mattered. Taako sometimes wonders if it had ever occurred to their parents that by far the most effective punishment for the twins would have been separating them. Their father was a smart man, it must have crossed his mind at some point - possibly he was simply too alarmed by the thought of the potential fallout to ever consider taking such an action. Lup and Taako might have been dubbed wild children by the world’s media, but when their parents had been alive they had been generally subdued and well behaved. Their bid for an end to separation had been their singular successful push back against a parental regime that was by turns brutally present and negligently invisible.

Now, they’re the ones separating themselves. Because Lup wants to go and see her stupid Phoenix Fire Missile in action, and daydream about killing bad guys. Taako, for his part, has less than no interest in receiving a full-body sand exfoliation in the desert for four days, without even a decent shower to return to, so he’s staying behind in the Goldcliff beach house, where he can control his exposure to the elements and _wonder of wonders_ , condition his hair. He bites his lip and looks up at his idiot, wonderful sister, who’s looking back down at him with all of Taako’s fears in her eyes.

“You let Ren look after you, you hear me?” says Lup, trying to sound firm.

“Sure, if you let Rosey look after you,” says Taako. He feels a little like someone’s pulling the heart out his chest, inch by uncomfortable inch. He sighs, and tugs at the end of his plait roughly,  “We’re so fucking codependent, I can’t with us. It’s ridiculous.”

Lup grins and all but leaps back down the steps of the plane, into his arms. “You could still come, you know,” she says into the collar of his shirt. She’s probably getting makeup on it; he finds he doesn’t care. “There’s always room for two.”

Taako rolls his eyes behind his sunglasses. “Why would I go to Zakhara to see an explosion? Those happen every day at the lab. Hell, if I get desperate I can just watch the testing videos of the betaflight stabilisers.” He was still digging parts of his C-X76 Jag out of the ceiling from that particular Lup-related disaster. Not to mention whatever she did to his fucking Audi.

Lup smirks at him, “This is the first clean missile to use repulsorlift technology, it’s going to be _magnificent_.”

“Yeah Lu, I helped you build it, remember? It goes boom, save the sales talk for the board room.”

Lup’s expression goes serious, and she curls her finger over the top of his sunglasses, getting fingerprints all over the glass and tipping them off his face. He catches them absently before they hit the ground. Lup touches her nose to his in an eskimo kiss. “Love you, Tiktak,” she says.

“Love you too, Lulu,” he mumbles.

She links their pinkies, so their tattoos line up as perfect as the day they got them on their sixteenth birthday. She squeezes once, then lets go.

Taako leans against the limo and waves at Lup’s tiny excited face in the jet window, until the plane carries her off and out of sight.

He rubs his thumb over the tiny red heart on the inside of his pinky finger, slides his shades back on, and gets back in the car.

***

Taako’s been in the car all of ten minute before Lup calls him. He grins as the call autoconnects and the photo of Lup on the screen switches to a live video of her face, sipping bourbon and coke against the backdrop of the private jet’s lounge.

“Sup,” says Taako, swiping the call onto the limo screen so he has his phone free to fiddle with.

“I’m bored,” says Lup, one leg splayed up the wall of the jet in a way that cannot possibly be comfy. “Entertain please.”

“I have bad news for you re: the entertainment opportunities in Zakhara, sister mine,” says Taako idly, without looking up.

“We have satellites over Zakhara,” Lup shrugs, “I’ll just harass you.”

“Who says I’ll answer the call,” says Taako, “I’m branching out, sis, enlarging the brand, growing as an _individge_.”

“ _Answer the call,”_ drawls Lup disdainfully, “Our calls autoconnect, you cretin.” What had started as a cute gimmick, when Taako first built their phones from scratch, had developed over the years into standard operating procedure. It’s caused issues in the past, for sure. Good thing Lup finds suddenly being third person privy to Taako’s one night stands hilarious rather than horrifying.

“They autoconnect cause I’m _lazy_ , Lulu. Never underestimate the lazy. I can revoke your privileges at any time.”

“Can you though? Can you? _Can you?_ Cause-”

“I swear to the gods, Lup, if you bring up the-”

“Because in the Advanced Software Engineering Part II exam at MIT-”

“I had the _flu,_ I had the goddam-”

“It was _pretty clear_ who the superior coder-”

“One _fucking mark_ cause I mixed up the answer bubbles-”

“And you know if I hadn’t judiciously, _mercifully_ intervened, it would have been a solo Lup up on that awards stage.”

Lup, on the last exam of the semester, after tormenting him for six months that she’d just have to hoist the oh-so-heavy academic excellence award by herself at the end of the year, had turned 180 degrees in her seat in the exam hall, given him an over-the-top wink, turned back around, and flubbed one of the questions. They’d jointly held the award that year, along with plenty of others, but Lup had never let him forget it.

“Goeth and fucketh thyself, Lupita,” says Taako, who has never gotten over it.

Lup cackles with laughter and Taako judiciously ignores her, flicking through social media with feigned dignity. The Instagram photo of him and Lup in the limo enroute to the airport already has 2 million likes.

“I need something to like, read,” says Lup. “What was that thing you were laughing at last night?”

Taako brightens, “Oh shit, yeah, some prestigious biochemist asshole - in fact, you know the one who won the Nobel prize a few years back with the- the cryon-electron microscopy thing, remember he was at the afterparty? He… Get this: He fucked about with gamma radiation, then went absolutely _gaga_ because _hello, gamma radiation!_ And submitted loads of weird shit to Nature and Science under a fake name. And _then_ when they told him to _fuck off,_ he published it online through one of those really sketchy journals that are pay-to-publish. It is absolutely buck wild, Lup, you have to read this shit. The man is wired to the goddamn moon.”

He swipes the file on his phone across to their shared drive, and hears Lup receive it a millisecond later with a little electronic chime.

Lup laughs incredulously as she skims through it, “This is perfect Taako, oh my god.”

“Right?!”

“We have to adopt him.”

“Absolutely not, he’s probably feral.”

The limo rolls to a stop outside the Goldcliff beach house, and Taako catches sight of some conspicuously inconspicuous sedans with tinted glass, parked just inside of the gate. Unlike the paparazzi, who are loitering outside their property line, these fools must have been allowed inside. He sighs heavily; this should be good.

“I gotta go Lup, Men In Black are here to recruit me. If they hit me with the neuralyzer, you’re just gonna have to fill me in on our life to date. Terrible parenting, tragic orphans, Times people of the year, just go for the Ts, that should cover everything.”

Lup laughs, “I’ll tell you our whole life story! I’ll start at the very beginning… It all started with me, the firstborn child-”

“Never mind!” shouts Taako, “I’ll just have Ren put together a briefing pack.”

Lup laughs softly, “Have fun playing with the feds, dingus. I’ll be back soon!”

“See ya, goofus.”

Taako disconnects the call, and regrets it for the rest of his life.

It is the last conversation he has with his sister.

***

There’s a woman waiting for him when he steps out the car. He makes sure to exit with dignity, all regal-like, and ignores Klarg, who is holding the door for him with suppressed amusement visible in the lines around his mouth. The woman is tall enough that Taako looks straight into her intelligent brown eyes. Her white hair is pulled up in a tight, efficient bun, and the lines of her navy business suit are sharp and fitted. Taako knows exactly who she is. And he’s got to admit, he has to admire her panache.

Taako sweeps straight past her, the large glass door to the condo sliding open as he approaches, and only glances back when he’s three feet inside and she’s still standing outside, crisp and clean in the baking Goldcliff sun. “You comin’ in or what?” he asks offhandedly.

She smiles politely and steps inside, and the door closes quietly behind her.

“Sup little dude,” a voice drawls, as Taako strides through the large, circular entrance space and up a few steps into the next room - a central open-plan living area, which overlaps ven-diagram-like with the first. It’s another huge circular space, with 360 views of the ocean. The Goldcliff mansion is he and Lup’s _baby_ \-  they designed it from scratch as a 25th birthday present to each other, ostentatious modern art sculptures and all.

“Yo GARYL,” says Taako, “How’s things?”

“Everything’s a-okay, my man! Stocks are up, sun’s hot, and I’ve been winning at online chess all afternoon. Checkit, this guy from Norway’s about to lose his goddamn _mind_.”

 It’s possible that he and Lup put a little too much of themselves into GARYL, but there’s a whole thing about God in his own image, right? Well their image is definitely obnoxiously, unapologetically smart and also a little bit of a bastard.

“Hell yeah, you show Carlsen who’s boss, GARYL, I believe in you.”

Taako turns to find the woman staring at the ceiling, which tends to be where the uninitiated look when GARYL talks. An AI’s relationship with space isn’t intuitive to most humans.

“GARYL,” explains Taako, one side of his face pulling up in a smirk. “Genius Artificial Reasoning: Yeehaw Losers!”

“Of course,” says the woman, smiling in return, “And the resemblance in name to you and your sister’s childhood babysitter is…?”

It’s intended to put him on the back foot, in the same way as he’d been trying to do to _her,_ when he ignored her all the way through the house.

“Super duper coincidence, right?” smiles Taako, without even trying to make it look real. He looks at the woman through his purple iridescent shades, tilts his head a little, and is abruptly fed up of people wanting things from him. He misses Lup already.

“What can I do for you, Madame Director? Or Lucretia? It’s Lucretia right?” he asks, “Or do you prefer the Journal Keeper? Sorry, that’s a _lot_ of titles. I usually only go by the one, and it has like, five letters so I can count them off on my hand if I get, like… _confused_.”

That actually gets him, like, a flicker of humour, in the depths of her brown eyes.

“Lucretia’s fine,” she appraises him mildly, “You seem to know a lot about me.”

“Mmm, we like to keep an eye on all the secret governmental organisations, especially those alphabet ones. FBI, CIA… BOB. Never trust an acronym, that’s what old grandpa Tostaada used to say.” He slits a look at her from behind his sunglasses, but he can’t get a read on her, and doesn’t know if the extent of his knowledge bothers her or not.

“Your grandfather invented the TV,” says Lucretia drily, “Possibly the most well known of all the acronyms.”

“Well we all know that TVs are perhaps the least trustworthy of all electrical devices, after printers and washing machines, so m’ point stands.” Taako takes a moment to reflect that his day drinking might actually be having some kind of impact on the coherency of the conversation, then shrugs it off. He’s right, anyway.

“I see,” says Lucretia, like she doesn’t, in fact, see. She recovers quickly and makes a brave stab at infusing some rationale into the conversation, “I was wondering if I could ask you some questions?”

“For sure my dude, but like.. Can we make them not hard ones? I’m so totally not the right person for that kind of thing.”

Taako wanders over to the wet bar, ever-stocked for last minute parties, and starts mixing a Long Island Iced Tea. Lucretia’s voice floats over the sound of the shaker.

“Hard questions?” she raises an eyebrow at him, “I was under the impression you were exactly the person for that kind of thing… No, thank you.” She declines his silent offer of a cocktail with a shake of her head and a small smile.

“Oh no, the genius thing’s all PR,” says Taako distractedly, focused as he is on measuring out Triple sec, “I’m an idiot, like, super _duper_ dense. My sister’s the smart one, I’m the pretty one with the good fashion sense and fantastic hair.”

“Didn’t you solve Fermat’s Last Theorem when you were fifteen?” Lucretia has to raise her voice to a semi-shout as the ice rattles around in the metal shaker.

“Well,” says Taako, pausing uncertainly in his shaking, “It was a rainy day, yaknow? Yaknow how it is on those- those rainy days?”

Lucretia blinks placidly at him. He’s not even getting away with an _inch_ of bullshit, people are usually _so fucking thrown_ by him by now that they’ll let him do whatever he wants with the conversation.

“You’re not too shabby yourself, you know?” Taako says, doubling down and deflecting like the five times winner of the deflection trophy at the passive-aggressive olympics, that he is. “Didn’t you bring down a whole country or something? Skelkor, right?”

If Lucretia can bring up Taako’s dead childhood babysitter, he can bring up the fact that she infiltrated a corrupt government, took notes on every single detail of the corruption, and brought almost the entire continent to its knees at the age of nineteen. The country literally has a different _name_ now, like, Taako and Lup are successful, but they’ve never forced a regime change.

Lucretia does actually look a little uncomfortable now. “Where did you learn that?”

“Lup loves all that _Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy_ shit. And you’re like, _The Spy_ , yaknow? The Captain Faerun of the espionage world.”

“That’s not exactly common knowledge.”

Taako shrugs, glad to have finally rattled this woman and her ooey-gooey gravitas, “Oh we gots all kinds of knowledge here, right GARYL? The common, the uncommon, the so-weird-it-should-probably-have-been-left-in-its-corner-of-the-internet-to-rot, all that good stuff.”

“Mr Taaco,” says Lucretia, evidently coming to the end of her tether in navigating the labyrinth of his conversational skills, “I’ve come to ask if you would be interested in a business partnership between Taaco Ventures and the Bureau. Our current contractor isn’t keeping up with the on-the-ground requirements, and your Munitions and Armaments sector is consistently the best option in the business.”

“Hell yeah it is,” says Taako, slurping on his Long Island.

“So…” Lucretia looks taken aback, “You’ll consider the deal?”

“Oh hell no, homie,” says Taako with a laugh. It’s a bit mean, he can be a bit mean, he’s made his peace with it.

Lucretia breathes in deep through her nose, and says through gritted teeth, “Can I ask… Why?”

Taako smirks at her, and sets his cocktail down on the counter with a thunk. “Numero _uno_ , my beloved sister is in charge of the Munitions and Armaments sector, because she likes things that go boom. _I_ am in charge of telecommunications and network technologies, which I doubt you’re interested in, unless you’re angling for a free Farspeech phone. Numero _dos_ , I know for a _factamundo_ that Lup’s already vetoed any partnership with the B-oh-B, to the _delight_ of our board I’m sure, because she doesn’t like what you guys point your guns at. Numero _tres_ , I’m betting you didn’t realise me and my sister actually communicated about things, or else you thought she’d made the decision without thinking about it, but whatever you thought, you just tried to go around her, through me, and that is _one hundo percent_ the most likely way to get your credit score ruined, ten out of ten experts agree.”

“But you’re fine with what the Faerunian government points its weapons at?” asks Lucretia, frowning, “That seems a little hypocritical.”

“ _Me_? I don’t give one single flying bat-fucking shit, homie. That’s why everyone and their terrorist me-maw can buy the Farspeech6. I’m not exactly _discerning_ about who I sell my shit to.”

He whips his glasses off and scowls at Lucretia, “But you ever call my sister a hypocrite again and you won’t hit a green light in your car for the rest of your natural life. She’s a good person, who actually tries to make the world a better place, and hasn’t recently caused any governments to go into meltdown and start massacring innocent civilians, so she’s doing a better job of the whole _morality_ thing than _you,_ at least.”

For a half beat, before she manages to wrangle her expression into one of careful neutrality, Lucretia looks at him like he’s slapped her. Taako feels a bit squirmy for a moment, but she’s trying to manipulate him and she needs to learn, just like _everyone else_ , that Taako isn’t a thing to be used or an asset to be managed, and he’s certainly not a tool to wielded against his sister. That kind of shit can only be met with extreme force, people gotta learn.

Lucretia takes a deep, calming breath. “I don’t expect you to understand what it takes to make the right call, even if it’s the hardest one to make. Those people were under a dictatorship-”

“And the fact that ending that dictatorship just happened to line up with Faerun foreign policy is like, _super good luck,_ amirite?”

Lucretia’s body slumps ever-so-slightly, into a pose Taako has seen often enough in his life to recognise as _giving up_. She says, with faultless politeness, “I can see we’re not going to get anywhere with this conversation. I apologise for taking up your time.”

Taako shrugs, “Hey feel free to try some other, uh- conversational theme. This one is just an itsy-bitsy bit derivative for my tastes. Like, ‘Taako, please give me your sister’s technology so I can do questionable stuff with it.’ We’re talking about a trope so tired it’s not just deceased, it was buried ten years ago. It’s grandchildren have children who don’t remember its name. But I’m not, like, kicking you out. I could go for a while on your pantsuit, it’s hot shit tee-bee-aitch.”

Lucretia looks like she thinks he’s making fun of her, which is kinda shitty.

“I’m not- I’m not being an asshole,” he clarifies, “I like the suit. Armani Spring line, right? It’s nice.”

“Oh,” says Lucretia quietly, “Thank you, Taako.”

Taako shrugs awkwardly because he hates people being sincere, and takes another big slurp of his Long Island Iced Tea. “Sure you won’t take some for the road?” he asks, as he walks Lucretia back to the door like the gracious host he is.

He gets another glimmer of humour for that, and counts it as a win, “I’m sure.” She turns to face him and gives him one last assessing look, “It’s been a pleasure to meet you, Taako.”

“Likewise,” trills Taako, no sincerity anywhere to be found, and GARYL closes the door behind her.

***

Taako spends the next day and a half surfing on the private beach in front of their house, sunbathing, working in the lab, cooking, and day drinking. He’s already finished Lup’s 28th birthday present - his latest techno-bender which required twelve days straight in the labs - and the new Farspeech6 is in development and will hit the shops soonish. Rosey and Ren already have Farspeech8, and he and Lup are omega testing Farspeech10 currently. He tinkers with a few projects but can’t really find the will or the way, with Lup living it up on another continent. He’s constitutionally incapable of cooking for one, so he orders pizza from his favourite 5-star Italian place and eats it on the beach with GARYL in his ear, sand between his toes, and a tablet on his lap. He’s flicking irresolutely between Vogue and a new paper on gravitational waves, when Ren’s face pops up in the corner of the screen.

“Taako!” she says, her voice getting a bit pitchy. Taako wrinkles his nose because that’s his thing, and he doesn’t appreciate having it pointed in his direction. “What are you doing in board shorts?”

Taako looks down at himself - his belly-button ring, his tanned, toned body, and his yellow beach shorts - and looks back up. “I’m a full-blooded Faerunian who thinks nude sunbathing is, like, hella gauche?” he tries, “I’m not _eurotrash_ , Ren.”

“You’re supposed to be at the _Children of Faerun_ Gala in… oh, _two hours ago_ ,” Ren says, frustration mixed equally with humour in her voice. It’s one of the many reasons Taako likes her - she doesn’t take them, or herself, too seriously.

“This is why you shouldn’t go to the West Coast without supervision!” Ren continues, “GARYL, why didn’t you remind him?”

“I totally did, dude!” chimes in GARYL, “He said, and I quote: ‘that sounds like a Future Taako kind of problem,’ and went back to napping!”

Taako vaguely remembers that now. But honestly, he’d been trying to even out his tan at the time, and that had been the more pressing issue, along with clawing back the sleep deficit he had created while making Lup’s present.

“Fine, it’s fine, I’ll go now,” says Taako, climbing to his feet and tucking the tablet into the little rock-shaped case that contains their beach-based technology. He and Lup have a tablet in every room of the house, the beach _and_ the roof, because only losers _carry shit_.

“You think you’ve got a car that’ll get you there for _two hours ago_ , Future Taako?” asks Ren in his earpiece. He can almost hear her arching one perfectly manicured eyebrow.

Taako grins, “God loves a trier, Ren.”

  

***

Thank fuck he has a personal shopper who does things like picking out his gala outfits in advance. It’s neatly bagged and labeled in his and Lup’s enormous walk-in wardrobe, and he approved it like three weeks ago, when Ren shoved a picture under his nose at dinner - which in retrospect was probably her way of distracting him from the fact that she had also handed him thirty or so contracts. The suit is a D&G Alta Sartoria single breasted tuxedo in a pastel blue silk, with jewel floral detail and a cute little grey-blue bow tie. It’s unfortunate - for him and the suit both - that he ends up despising it with all the fires of hell.

It’s weird getting ready for an event without Lup - weirder still to not have her opinion on his outfit or her fingers on his face, artfully smudging his makeup - but he makes do as best he can. GARYL turns up the music loud without Taako having to ask, to cover the unsettling quiet of the bedroom. Taako hums along as he finger-combs his hair out of its braid into big, sea-salt-stuck curls that tumble down his back. For a finishing touch he slips in a sapphire and pearl haircomb piece, then slides on silver Louboutin loafers - which he thinks are probably Lup’s - and finishes with some silver and sapphire jewellery.

He leaves his hair loose because the beach bum look is kind of cute, and also because he’s never learned to do anything with his hair past a simple ponytail, because he’s a _twin_ , dammnit, and what is the _point_ of having a twin if they don’t do your hair every morning? He can do all kinds of braids on _Lup_ , french knots and fishtails and chignons for days, but he once tried to do a simple plait on himself and nearly came away from the endeavor _sans hair_. So it’s a no updoes policy for Taako, at least not for the next few days.

Since Lup destroyed his very-favourite-Audi doing something she still hasn’t explained to him, he grabs the keys to the blue and silver Bugatti Veyron SS on his way through the garage. He nimbly evades Dupree, who is wielding a fire-extinguisher, and escapes to the safety of the car, where he scoots down the window by an inch and gives his robot a shit-eating grin.

“Don’t wait up for me, kids!” Taako calls, as _Africa by Toto_ starts playing over the car’s surround sound speakers.

Dupree beeps angrily at him in response, for daring to escape with his designer suit intact and - most importantly - still theoretically flammable. Taako revs the engine, then, as GARLY slides open the garage doors, spins off into the warm evening air.

Given his many and varied experience with automobile accidents, it surprises Taako sometimes how much he loves driving. There’s just something about moving faster than all the Gods and the Goldcliff City Municipal Council intended that really entertains him, as a premise. He still doesn’t love driving as much as Lup, who, when they were eighteen, had gotten bored while he was on a date, and wrapped her Corvette around the Neverwinter Memorial Fountain going 120 in a 50 zone. It marks the first and only time in his life that he’s made Lup cry, and thanks to a morally bankrupt nurse, his impassioned, screechy, red-eyed cry-rant about how he refused to live without her had been on the news by ten o’clock that very night. TV’s, man: not to be trusted.

Breaking her arm had done very little to discourage Lup’s love of going super fast in shiny expensive things, but it had been a while before Taako (or Klarg, for that matter) had let her behind the wheel of a car again. If he’s honest with himself, it still makes him nervous.

And then there was that time with their parents when they were twelve, but Taako is always a-go for not thinking about that.

Driving round the Goldcliff Loop - the stretch of freeway that circles the city - with the sea on his left and the stars just coming out in the still-warm evening sky above, Taako feels one of those immense swells of peace and contentment that occasionally ripple through him. He’s in a nice car, in a sweet suit, on his way to some fancy cocktails and pretty people. Lup will be back in a few days and in a couple weeks time they’ll have their yearly Infamous Birthday Extravaganza, and he’ll get to give Lup her present, which is hella cool. It’s cool, their lives are cool, and when his numerous and exhaustive list of mental health issues give him a break, things look pretty bright.

When he arrives at the _Children of Whatever_ gala, there’s the usual flash-shout of the paparazzi as he underhand lobs his keys in the direction of the parking valet guy. He scales the steps two at a time, waving and grinning at the paps, but not slowing down long enough for any of them to get any conversation in. Reporters are like sharks, you gotta keep moving.

Un _fortunately_ , Chris Everhart is there, and as Taako slept with him once by accident while high on an interesting mix of alcohol, MDMA and prescription sleeping tablets, it would be super shitty to just ignore the guy, and he’s also still _super hot_ , so Taako rolls to a stop at his section of the red carpet.

“Chris Everhart, Vanity Fair,” Taako says, in time with him. He grins, Everhart does not.

Everhart sticks a tape recorder under his nose, which Taako blinks at for a moment, more affronted by someone waving three-decade-old technology at him than he would be if they opened a flasher coat and gave him an eye-full of their genitals.

“You and your sister have been called the Da Vincis of our time, what do you say to that?” Everhart asks, and _hell yeah_ , he knew no one could spend a night in the sack with Taako and not come out a fan.

“Patently untrue, we’re much prettier,” says Taako with half a grin.

“What about your other nicknames?” asks Everhart, expression stony, “The _Merchants of Death_? The UN security council have condemned Faerun-led missile attacks in Zakhara for over a year now, and yet Lup Taaco is currently just outside the capital city of Huzuz, demonstrating one of the most deadly ballistic missiles ever developed. Do you believe yourselves exempt from international law?”

Aaaand _now_ he remembers that he crawled _out_ of bed with Everhart at butt-fuck-AM, after Everhart had started lightly snoring, and had colonised Lup’s Super-King. For one, she had the good painkillers in her bedside cabinet, and for two, it was an effort in futility for Taako to sleep next to anyone he didn’t trust not to actively attempt to kill him in the night - which when you got right down to it, meant that only Lup got the dubious pleasure of waking up next to him. He got night terrors, anyway, he was doing Everhart a favour. And if he sent Ren in the next morning to escort him off the property, he was just minimising the awkwardness of seeing a one-night-stand in the cold light of day for both of them. He’d been doing the guy a goddamn favour.

It seemed like maybe Chris hadn’t taken it in the spirit with which it was intended.

“Listen,” says Taako, in his best placating voice, “I’m super into world peace, really, ya couldn’t find a bigger fan than Taako. But I’m also a pragmatist, and like - this shit is happening anyway, you know? If Taaco Ventures stops developing weapons, all that’s going to happen is that the Faerun army will be supplied with sub-par shit, and Lucas Miller will make a fortune, which is objectively even worse-” Everhart looks like he’s about to start arguing that, but Taako is not here for Miller Industries apologism, so he rails on, “Listen, hear me out. If we stop supplying tomorrow? It’s not going to stop any wars, it’s not gonna _save any lives_ , it’s of no material benefit to anyone. And like, I vividly remember your magazine fucking _loved_ our Intellicrop scheme, and our Infrastructure Development Project, and that shit is military funded, okay? That stuff doesn’t come out of nowhere.”

“So you’re saying war profiteering is alright as long as you share some of the proceeds?”

“I’m saying get out of my face, Everhart. I have a rad party to get to and, like,  shockingly, you’re not invited.”

Taako strides off, irritated that he just got cornered into talking about shit that isn’t how great he is. The munitions development wing of the company is Lup’s thing, anyway. _He_ just wants to release incrementally slimmer phones to the market every year and add a few zeroes to his net worth. But nooo, every time he turns around there’s someone waiting to discuss Faerun foreign policy and the ethics of the armament industry, as if he _gives a fuck_.

He gets a text from Rosey as he ascends the red-carpeted stairs and enters the gala ballroom.

Rosey: Your sister is refusing to sit with me. She’s designated her car the Fun-vee and has consigned me to the Hum-Drum-Vee.

Taako: thats so valid tbh

Taako: howd things go?

Taako: she convinced them we’re awesome yet?

                       

Rosey: Oh they’re pretty well convinced.

Rosey: She did a great job, I was really proud of her

Taako: gross

Taako: tell her to call me when she’s done basking in her adoring public

Taako: or probs before then, like, we’re all slowly dying on this bitch of an earth but not that slowly

Rosey: Lol, will do

He’d call her himself, but that autoconnect feature has its downsides and one of them is Lup having a serious conversation with military leaders re: her Incredibly Deadly Missile, and her phone suddenly streaming a video call of Taako guzzling the margarita he just stole from a passing waiter; it can wait.

Besides, he’s just spotted his number one fan and needs his ego stroked post-Everhart-mauling.

Sazed looks fucking _delighted_ to see him, and puts his arms out for a hug, “Taako! I didn’t think you were coming!”

“Oh hells yeah, baby, I’m always down for an open bar.” Taako accepts the hug with reasonably good grace, because he likes Sazed and he’s a bit touch starved from just one day sans-Lup.

Sazed’s holding a chunky award, all glass and gold tack, and he waves it in the air, “This is yours, by the way. I collected it on your behalf after a solid minute of awkward spotlight on an empty seat. It was hilarious, The Children of Faerun thank you.”  The last bit is so heavily sardonic that Taako can’t help but snort-laugh.

“You can _keep it_ , my dude. What the fuck am I gonna do with it, use it for scrap?”

“Mmm,” says Sazed, nodding thoughtfully, “Just what I’ve always wanted, an award with another man’s name on it, from an army of unnamed children. I’ll put it on my fireplace.”

“Do it! Use it as a talking piece!” Taako says, emphatically.

“Where’s your other half?” asks Sazed, “Running around Zakhara, going days without showers, I hear?” He steers Taako towards the bar, which is just one more tally in the column of reasons why Taako likes him.

“I _know_ , right? You think you know somebody. You know she tried to tell me it was like a day at the beach? I told her, it’s like _living_ at the beach, except there’s no water, no surfing, the sun’s too hot to sunbathe and people keep trying to shoot you. It’s like hell’s artistic interpretation of a beach.”

Sazed laughs hysterically, which Taako also likes. For someone as fucking hilarious as he is, far too few people laugh at his jokes. He figures this is because the Taaco Ventures’ board of directors had their sense of humour surgically removed at birth, Rosey had theirs removed by the military post-college, and Ren’s is worn thin from his and Lup’s constant _antics._ Lup thinks he’s funny, but that’s only because they share a brain. Sometimes it’s nice to have a person like you and think you’re funny in your own right.

After Lup and Taako, Sazed is the youngest major shares holder on the TV board, having been in his mid-twenties when his father had a massive heart attack and bequeathed his shares to him. Since then Sazed had supported Taako and Lup in the boardroom and outside it without question. He was instrumental in Taako getting the go-ahead to release his high-tech luxury cooking goods line, which was currently making massive profits, thanks _very_ much. Taako and Sazed even had a chat called: Countdown Til Lup Murders Everyone, which they messaged on when Lup looked dangerously like she was contemplating bringing her missile into the TV boardroom and just setting it the fuck off.

Sazed gets Taako a fruity cocktail number and a whisky for himself. “Yeah, the Zakharan Desert doesn’t sound like my idea of a good time either, I’ve got to admit. I’m more of a pool and mimosas kinda guy.”

“Have you been to our pool at the beach house?” Taako asks, twirling the cocktail umbrella between his fingers, “You should come round, we got flumes and an infinity pool and shit, it’s baller.”

Sazed points at him, “Now that’s what I’m talking about, fuck Zakhara. When can I come round and see this pool, it sounds amazing.”

Taako laughs, “Like, tomorrow? How have you never been to our Goldcliff place before?”

“I’m almost never out on this coast, I’m usually far too busy mopping up your Neverwinter messes,” says Sazed with a grin and a wink. Then he says casually, “And honestly I’m not sure Lup would have wanted me there. She’s not my biggest fan, right?” Sazed doesn’t look remotely bothered, but Taako still feels a bit bad for him.

“Pshht, she likes you fine,” he says, more out of politeness than any real attempt to convince anyone.

The thing is, Sazed is ambitious, charming, and a bit sneaky and Taako thinks it’s _great_. Lup decidedly does _not,_ which Taako thinks is a bit hypocritical given that she loves _him_ and he is nothing if not the living exemplification of Slytherin house. He even has the scarf.

“I just don’t _trust_ him, Tiktak,” she had once said, “I know he helps us out now, but I can never shake the feeling that it’s all self interest. I don’t think friendship _means_ anything to him.”

“Who said anything about _trusting_ him, Lulu?” Taako had said, “The man’s fun to have a drink with!”

He and Sazed chill at the bar for the next few hours, collecting a halo of groupies who hang on their every word, so they keep it light, no work chat, and settle for making fun of people in the crowd. Normally it would be Taako and Lup leaning up against the bar, casually ripping into the Goldcliffe elite, but Sazed does a good enough job of keeping Taako entertained in her place. It makes Taako feel a bit bad about all the other events, where Sazed had been relegated to a quick hello nod on account of Lup’s dislike.

“That guy has worn a black tux to the met gala every _single year_ I have attended,” Taako says, openly pointing at some generic Chris or Tom movie star, who gives him a dirty look in response. “Last year I asked him, I was like: ‘how _exactly_ does this convey fashion in the age of technology. Really _explain_ it to me, I’m willing to be convinced here, but ya gotta give me something.’”

 He’s loose limbed, more than a little buzzed, gesturing with his drink and feeling pretty alright, all things considered. He’s so glad he missed the awards part of the ceremony and got to skip straight to the booze. There’s still a cocktail umbrella in his hair from where he stuck it earlier, freeing his hands to better illustrate to Sazed how poor the metal quality in his latest shitty award was.

Sazed can’t seem to stop laughing and his eyes on Taako are fond, “I saw the photos from that one, you looked phenomenal.”

“Natch,” says Taako, preening a bit. “Although all anyone could talk about was that I was wearing a skirt, I was like, _hello_. I programmed the _fabric_ to respond to the _environment_. I _programmed fabric_. Lets all calm down about me showing a bit of knee and appreciate my fuckin’ _genius_ , amirite?”

“To be fair,” says Sazed quietly into his ear, “They are very nice knees.”

Taako slits a glance at him from the corner of his eye. The moderately intelligent part of Taako’s brain is reminding him that if he sleeps with Sazed it could ruin their professional relationship. At the very least it would be awkward facing him in the boardroom again. Also, Lup would _kill him_ and that would also be awkward. Shit, what was her problem with this guy, he was great. Anyway the drunk part of his brain wanted to _bone down_.

Taako’s phone buzzes in his pocket, and he silences it. He’s currently having a complex internal debate about the merits of sleeping with a person who owns huge stocks in his business. Ten pina coladas down the line, he doesn’t have the brain space for distractions.

“That skirt was barely even _flirty_ length, I needed so much material to get the thing working. You should see me in _short shorts_.”

Looks like the decision making processes were getting routed through the attention-seeking, slutty park of Taako’s brain, which was always a bad sign. He should really code, like, a decision-making algorithm for these kind of situations. And then rig it to shock him when he starts to make bad choices in spite of it - because let's be real, he’s never going to do as he’s told just cause a stupid algorithm tells him to. He’s wondering why this has stroke of genius has never occurred to him before, when he remembers that stopping him from doing stupid shit is literally Lup’s primary directive in life, after loving him and stealing his shoes, and he cracks up.

“What’s so funny?” asks Sazed, starting to chuckle in response to Taako’s crazy, contagious laughter. Ren always says that once Taako starts laughing nobody else can hold a straight face and he’s almost certain it’s not a complement, but it seems to hold true.

Taako shakes his head, still laughing, “Nothing, nothing - I’m just buzzed, my man! Where’s your will to be weird?”

Sazed snorts and says something about Taako being inspired.

Taako’s phone buzzes again, and he reaches into his pocket to silence it, only to find it’s already switched to Do Not Disturb, which means GARYL’s overriding his settings. He gets distracted from checking his messages by someone hurrying past, knocking his arm.

There’s a weird atmosphere going on around him though, he’s picking up on it now. People are, like, checking their phones. Moving weirdly. Glancing at him. Taako’s worked in and around business and politics for his entire adult life, he knows how to read body language, how to pick up a vibe. Sazed’s frowning as well, when Taako looks back at him. “What’s going-” Sazed begins.

“Put it on the- on the screen,” someone says, from somewhere behind the bar at Taako’s five o’clock, and there’s static on the big plasma screen, that has up till now been showing clips from the awards ceremony and the red carpet.

It’s the news, it’s the ten o’clock news, and there’s a ticker at the bottom, scrolling slowly across the screen, and his phone is buzzing unstoppably, and it says:

LUP TAACO MISSING: BILLIONAIRE INDUSTRIALIST PRESUMED DEAD AFTER ATTACK ON MILITARY CONVOY IN ZAKHARA

There’s a live video playing, an wide-angle aerial view from a news helicopter, of a humvee that has been blown to pieces.

There is a photo taken at the gala that night, which Time Magazine publishes as the Most Influential Photo of the Year. It features Taako, the rest of the party an out-of-focus blur around him, in a pastel blue silk tuxedo. A cocktail umbrella is stuck jauntily out of the blonde waves of his hair. There’s a champagne glass slipping from his fingers, falling through the air, but it hasn’t yet hit the ground. The expression on his face is… Well. It’s what wins that photographer all those awards.


	2. Chapter 2

Taako isn’t aware of how much time passes between the champagne glass hitting the floor and Sazed bundling him into the back seat of the Bugatti. He barely processes their exit, but he thinks they go out through the kitchen. His eyes slide off shiny chrome and rows of pans, and staff in chef’s whites who’ve stopped what they’re doing to stare. There’s a few paparazzi round the back of the venue, who spring to life as Sazed drags Taako out into the cool evening air. They snap photos and shout, and Sazed says: “No comment,” which is what Taako’s PR manager has always told him not to say, she’s all about _reframing the question_ and _deflection through bridging,_ but in his defence Sazed hasn’t been in half as many scandals as Taako has.

“Hey Taako, your sister’s dead, right?” shouts one of the paps, and Taako jerks and looks straight into his waiting camera, the way he’s been trained not since he was a kid.

He hits the Bugatti leather seats and GARYL’s voice is immediately around him, all business in a way he very rarely is.

“Taako, I’m trying to get Colonel Roswell on the line. I had full coverage right up until the blast and I have eyes on the area outside Huzuz that-”

Taako makes a jittery flapping gesture for silence and pulls out his phone, dismissing the many missed calls. GARYL, Ren, their PR manager, the board of directors. He swipes them away and calls Lup.

Instead of the autoconnect, there’s just a long beep and a robotic: _I’m sorry,_ _this phone has been disconnected_.

Taako calls again, then again, and again.

Sazed is in the front seat, reversing through a swarm of paparazzi, cursing steadily under his breath.

Taako can’t see his phone, the world is blurring around him, he keeps calling, his finger is slipping on the glass of his phone, there’s water on the surface. It feels like his goddamn sternum has caved in, like there’s a washer-dryer sitting on his chest.

GARYL’s voice is in his ear, urgent, “Taako, dude, you gotta take the lead here. What do you want me to do?”

There’s a crunch, as the car runs over something metal, and the shouting outside the car picks up a notch. “Woops,” mutters Sazed, utterly insincere.

_I’m sorry,_ _this phone has been disconnected_. _I’m sorry,_ _this phone has been disconnected_. _I’m sorry,_ _this phone has been disconnected_. _I’m sorry,_ _this phone has been disconnected_.

There’s a ringing in his ears, and he tastes blood in his throat, and the air is coming out of his lungs in staccato bursts.

“The call won’t connect,” he says, he thinks he says, “It won’t connect, why won’t it connect?”

No one answers him, but Sazed risks a glance over his shoulder at him as he merges onto the freeway. “Hold on, Taako, we’re almost home. I’ll get you home.”

“Colonel Roswell on the line, Taako,” GARYL says, “I’m patching them through.”

Rosey’s grainy face appears, bloodied and wild-eyed.

“Taako-” they start.

Taako feels hope stab briefly, somewhere just below his solar plexus, that this will all turn out to be nothing, that Lup will enter, stage left, and then _never leave his side again_.

“Where’s Lup, Rosey?” Taako says. He wonders if his voice sounds as small out loud as it does in his head, under the static buzz of panic. He can’t focus on the world around him, on Rosey’s face or voice, he’s shaking apart in an earthquake of panic. He digs his nails into his face to keep things together, peers at the screen from between his fingers. “Where the fuck is my sister?”

“I’m so sorry Taako,” says Rosey, and there are tears welling in the corners of their eyes.

 Taako feels like his heart is caught in a machine vice, squeezed tighter and tighter until its compressed down, a hot angry ball in his throat that burns and makes his eyes sting.

“ _Where is she?”_ Taako hears his own voice from very far away. His lips are numb.

“I’m sorry, we can’t find her. I got airlifted out while I was still unconscious, but they’re saying they’ve combed the area and they can’t find her, I’m going back out now, I’m just-”

“You said you’d look after her, Rosey,” Taako says, his voice is breaking, wavering, he ploughs on, _“_ You said she’d be safe. She went out wearing a khaki vest top she got from _Nordstrom_ , for fucks sake, this was supposed to be a _PR_ jaunt.”

“There wasn’t supposed to any active movement in that area! There hasn’t been- I have no idea what happened. I’m so sorry, Taako, I’m so-” Rosey breaks off as their voice cracks and Taako watches as tears leak down their cheeks. He feels utterly numb to it, he doesn’t have time for this, he has to find Lup.

“We’re here, Taako,” says Sazed, as they pull up the long winding road towards the beach house. There’s already paparazzi camped out around the gate to the property.

“Is Ren with you?” Rosey asks, in response to Sazed’s voice, like they’re worried about _Taako_ , like Taako’s the one anyone needs to be concerned about right now.

Taako feels a swell of desperate, wild anger at how out of place Rosey’s priorities are right now.

“It’s Sazed,” Taako dismisses the entire premise of the conversation in favour of the more pressing issue, “You’re going back out?”

“Yes, I’m-”

“Find my sister,” he says, demands, and cuts the call.

The gates close behind them, shutting off the paparazzi, and GARYL opens the door to the carport. Sazed pulls the car smoothly down the ramp and into the underground garage, then sets about reverse parking at a glacially slow rate. He inches past the other cars with a deliberate caution that couldn’t be more at odds with the way Taako and Lup squeal them around. Taako clambers out the car before it’s even finished moving, prompting a startled shout from Sazed.  He stumbles over to the workshop on the other side of the open plan basement.

“Show me what you’ve got,” he mumbles to GARYL, working past the urge to cry. He can have a mental breakdown once he’s found Lup. Until then he’s got to hold himself together.

“Alright,” says GARYL, his deep voice grounding Taako in a way that fingernails digging into skin have thus far failed. “I was with Lup right up until the blast went off, and there’s audio of the whole thing. She was just talkin’ shit with the marines… It came out of nowhere-”

GARYL sounds shaken, panicked, now that Taako’s listening properly, and he doesn’t know what to do with that. He and Lup are GARYL’s family - in a sense, the closest thing GARYL has for a mom and dad - and he just heard his mom get blown up. No wonder he’s losing his shit, Taako’s shit’s been gone since before the champagne hit the floor.

“It’s okay pumpkin, just, uh-” Taako pinches the bridge of his nose, tries to get the world to stop spinning, “Just focus, okay. Play me the audio, and uh- Show me her exact location. When did this all go down?”

“Forty three minutes ago,” says GARYL, “I tried to get hold of you the minute it happened but I couldn’t get through. I should have hijacked someone else’s phone but I was so focused on Lup... I’m so sorry, Taako, I-”

“No, listen- We’re not playing the blame game right now, okay? I should have answered my fucking phone, but we’re here, it’s happened. Let me hear it.”

The recording comes on over the surround sound speakers, and Taako hears his sister’s voice, loud and full of laughter:

“What, are you guys takin’ me to a court martial or somethin’? C’mon! What is it? Are you not allowed to talk?”

“We’re allowed to talk, ma’am.”

“Oh good, so it’s personal? Wait, don’t tell me, you don’t like the shirt? Please say you like the shirt, my brother told me it was shit, but I didn’t believe him, and if you say it’s the shirt, I’m telling you now, I won’t survive the shame. He’ll find out somehow, I know he will.”

“They’re intimidated by you,” says a woman’s voice, over muffled laughter in the background.

“That’s very sensible,” says Lup conversationally, “I’m very intimidating. One time someone tried to punch me and their throat swelled up and they nearly died.”

(Taako snorts helplessly, he loved that story when he was in the middle of it, and it’s only improved with age.)

“I’m not sure I follow, ma’am,” says an uncertain male voice.

“Oh please don’t call me ma’am, I’m literally five years older than you, absolute max. Anyway, yeah, I panicked and threw a bowl of peanuts at his apparently-allergic-to-nuts face. Fucking nat twentied that one, the guy hit notes with his mouth hole _I_ didn’t know existed.”

There’s a whole lot of laughter; Lup’s hella charming and gorgeous to boot, no one can resist her for long.

There’s a beat, then Lup’s incredulous voice says, “What part of _don’t call me ma’am_ screams to you, _I should put my hand up in the air before talking_? Dude! Are you kidding me?”

More laughter-

The same uncertain voice again, “Uh, Miss Taaco, is it cool if I took a photo with you?’

“Pshh, _Miss Taaco_. If we’re gonna be all formal like, I’m _Professor_ Taaco, technically, I gotta PHD or four, a-thankyouverymuch. But anyway, yes, it would be very cool.”

There’s some fumbling, then someone else asks, “How do I turn the flash off?”

“You swipe left from the edge and press the lightning sign my dude,” says Lup, sounding horrified, “Come on now, this is a standard issue Farspeech phone, right? Please tell me you don’t have Miller tech. We can’t be friends if you’ve got a Crystal phone, it’s against the law. It’s against my _personal moral code_.”

“I keep telling him!” pipes up the uncertain voice, “I told him Farspeech phones are so much easier!”

“I got it,” mutters the other voice.

“Cool, gang sides up babe,” Lup says. (Taako gets an image, sharp and bright in his mind, of Lup shooting finger guns at the camera.)

“Will I get-”

There’s a clattering, staccato noise, and a crash, and people shouting in surprise.

Lup says, “What’s going on?” in her very best trying-to-stay-calm voice.

“Contact front left!” the woman shouts.

“Shit!” someone else, under a snare roll of more gunfire.

“Jimmy, stay with her!” and the slamming of a door closing.

More bullets, then a heavy noise, and Lup makes a noise of shock.

“Shit!” its the uncertain voice again, must be Jimmy, “Shit, shit, shit.”

Then Lup, “No, wait! Wait! Don’t- Gimme a gun!”

Jimmy shouts, “Stay! Here!” distantly, from behind a closed door?

There’s a sound like heavy hail, then silence, and Taako hears Lup breathing heavily.

He hears the noise of the humvee door opening, and Lup’s footsteps, staggering then running.

“GARYL, babe? You there?” out of breath, serious but calm.

“I’m here, Lup, have you been hit? I have your location, I-”

“Shit!”

There’s an even bigger explosion and more hail, and a scuffing noise like Lup’s hit the ground.

“Lup? _Lup_!” GARYL shouts.

“Fuck-” Lup says breathlessly, “Fuck, you gotta get me out of here, babe. I got a- a- fuckin- _rock_ between me and the bad guys right now. Not even a big rock. Medium at-”

There’s a high pitched, shrill WHEEEEEEE and a thud.

“Oh fuck,” says Lup, softly. “Taako-”

And then the world explodes, and the scream of the speakers blowing out echoes round the room, and when GARYL shuts off the recording, Taako’s ears ring in the silence left behind.

His whole body is shaking, and it takes him half a beat to notice that Dupree has wheeled himself over and is tugging at Taako’s jacket with his tiny pincer arms, his boxy robot head tilted to the side pathetically.

Taako grips Dupree’s support column wordlessly, trying to give comfort and stay vertical at the same time. Dupree beeps sadly and shuffles up closer, till he’s tucked into Taako’s arm.

Skuttlebuddy, not one to miss out on the action, scales Taako’s leg at speed and scurries up to nestle in the crook of his neck. He gets his rotors tangled in strands of Taako’s hair, and Taako can’t even find it in himself to care, just strokes over Skuttlebuddy’s shiny LED shell with one long finger.

“I know,” Taako mumbles from between numb lips, “I know, I’m gonna fix it, I promise.”

Sazed watches bemusedly from below the raised platform that constitutes Lup and Taako’s work space, but Taako can’t deal with that right now. His child-bots are devastated and his sister is missing and GARYL is probably having the first AI emotional breakdown ever recorded, and he _has to find Lup_.

“Show me where this shit went down, GARYL. And throw up the live feed.”

***

It doesn’t take long for Taako to realise that in spite of him literally _pulling a satellite out of orbit,_ he can’t find a trace of Lup anywhere, and he's getting inpatient with not knowing the progress of the search party on the ground. He knows Rosey can’t be on the phone with him at all times, but watching the Rosey-dot inch slowly around the live map in a systematic grid pattern, he feels like he’s about to claw out of his own skin.

Sazed is behind him, propped against one of the worktables with his eyes half open. He’s picked up a spare tablet from one of the piles of technology lying around, and is tapping away at it and his phone simultaneously. When Taako checks the tablet’s activity remotely out of a desperate, wild need to distract himself - and hey, it’s his tablet, he has a legal right - he sees that Sazed has spent every minute since they arrived emailing board members, associates and PR contacts, trying to secure Lup and Taako’s place on the board. Taako skims through press releases and email chains calling for unity and support in this time of crisis, and endless assurances that Taako has everything under control. It's the kind of thing Taako imagines Ren’s been doing too, but Sazed staying up all night to support them, sleepless and grimacing at Dupree’s poor attempts at coffee, standing firm in their corner without hesitation, makes tears well foolishly in Taako’s eyes. He schools them back, because that is _fucking ridiculous_. But he can’t help but watch Sazed for maybe a beat too long.

“You alright in there, Taako?” Sazed asks, a small smile curving the edges of his tired face.

“I’m fine,” says Taako, voice high and sad and utterly unconvincing.

Sazed nods and does Taako the favour of taking him at his word. He can’t help but think that _God_ , this guy might not have been Lup’s cup of tea but he certainly knows how to manage Taako.

Taako turns back to the tiny dot, crawling along the huge expanse of Zakhara like a broken pixel on a football screen, and feels his frustration crest in him like a wave.

He texts Ren -

Taako: come out to goldcliff pls

Taako: bring the jet

Ren: I’m on my way

Ren: Taako, is there anyone with you? Can you call me? I just want to make sure you’re okay

Taako: not okay, don’t have time to talk, get movin

As soon as he’s done, he tosses the phone onto the work table and strides out of the workshop, leaving a bewildered Sazed behind without a second thought. There’s no elevators in any property that Lup and Taako own, because the thought of financially contributing to Lucas Miller’s empire makes them both ill. In Taaco Tower in Neverwinter, this requires some fancy vertical-movement themed innovations, but in the Goldcliff beach house, all that it means is that Taako gets his steps in. He hurls himself up the glass stairs and along the wide corridor that overlooks the beach front. The huge floor-to-ceiling windows are currently painting a panoramic view of a dark sky and turbulent sea.

He slams back the door to his and Lup’s shared dressing room. On the dresser there’s debris from his last-minute attempts at getting ready for the gala, jewelry and nail polish discarded next to his makeup tray. The room is low-lit, with just his violet-tinged guide-lights illuminating the sharp edges and shiny surfaces. Taako pauses for a moment in the dark. He feels like his body is vibrating. He raises one hand in front of his face and watches with interest as it shakes violently. He’s terrified, he realises, all at once. His whole body is strumming with pure, unadulterated terror.

It’s then that Taako notices what he’d missed earlier, in his whirl of dressing and primping. On the dresser, stuck to the mirror with a novelty magnet, is a note in Lup’s looping handwriting. It’s the kind of thing they leave for each other out of a wilted sense of irony - handwritten notes in a digital age. The paper is a scrap torn from a recent Rolling Stone article about them, that Lup had been reading the morning before she left; Taako recognises the glowing sentences and complimentary phrasing.  Lup’s scrawled two words in thick black sharpie, and pressed a lipsticky red kiss in place of her signature. Just seeing it makes Taako’s heart stop beating for a few seconds.

He tears the note down from the mirror, stuffs it in his pocket, and hurls himself back into movement, yanking out two large cases from the back of a closet. He fills one hurriedly with the first clothes to come to hand, then bumps them both back down the stairs.

He slams into the lab and Sazed jumps, then eyes him carefully, the same way people watch cats that are about to knock over expensive vases. Taako opens one of the product caches, a sliding storage space that opens out of the wall, and pulls out some technology he’s been messing around with. He places a micro generator, a palm-sized server, and a water filtration device carefully into one of the cases. Next in are his and Lup’s laptops - the most powerful in the world, last he checked - then a huge heap of cables and sensors, and a small satellite disk. The last thing he puts in is a soft, gift wrapped package - his birthday present to Lup.

“Taako, can I make a suggestion?” says GARYL hesitantly.

“Sure thing,” says Taako, casting around for anything he might have missed.

“I think Lup would want you to take the birthday present she made for you.”

Across the lab, GARYL illuminates Lup’s private safe in the bright pinkish red light of her operating system. Private means, in true Taaco Twin fashion, that Taako knows the code, but won’t actually use it unless it’s an emergency. The code is the first seven numbers of the Lazy Caterer’s sequence, which is his favourite mathematical series because of it’s obvious culinary usefulness. _His_ private safe uses Lup’s favourite sequence, which is Fibonacci’s, because Lup’s fuckin _gauche_.

He loves her so fucking much though.

He crosses the lab to Lup’s safe and punches in 1247111. When he opens the door, a package wrapped in deep purple paper rolls into his hands. He sticks it in his case along with everything else. Hopefully he’ll find Lup within the next few days and when she bemoans the fact that they’ll have missed most of the prep work for their birthday party, he can whip out the present and say, ‘Oh, I already started opening presents, I thought that was the procedure for when one of us went on holiday _and tried to fucking die_.’ He has the whole thing planned out in his head, and at this point it’s the only thing stopping him from hyperventilating himself to death.

He slams the case lid down and leans on it a bit till he can zip it close.

“Taako,” says Sazed warily, “What are you doing?”

“Packing,” says Taako, clawing irritatedly at his hair where it’s sticking to his neck, and narrowly avoiding dislodging Skuttlebuddy, who’s riding shotgun on his collar. He zips round the lab, collecting odds and ends, Dupree tailing him like a lost duckling. Taako would usually have more patience for it, but right now he’s trying to think about what he can’t afford to forget if he wants to find his sister, clinging to a veneer of calm with his teeth, and the third time Dupree runs over his feet he just about loses his entire mind.

“Would you _please,_ for the love of _all that is fucking holy_ , get the **_fuck_** _out of my way_!” he shouts, and Dupree spins back away from him until he’s hiding in the corner beside the sofa. Dupree pulls the blanket over himself, because when the twins were programming the first AI to ever exist they forgot to account for object permanence,  and hides where he thinks Taako can’t see him.

Taako’s heart breaks a little. He walks over to Dupree and pulls the blanket gently from his boxy head, “I’m sorry, pumpkin,” he mumbles, hugging the blanket to himself with one hand, resting the other on Dupree’s support column. “I’m real sorry. I’m just upset, it’s not your fault.”

Dupree rotates his head from side to side, and Taako mimics him.

“No, it’s my fault.” says Taako again, “I’m sorry, bubelah.” Tears well again, helplessly, and he brushes them irritatedly away.

Dupree beeps sadly. Taako tucks the blanket around Dupree’s shoulders and ties it at the front, so it looks like he’s wearing a patchwork cape.

“I know, I know,” mumbles Taako. “I’m gonna fix it.”

He spins back to the holo-displays and, with expansive gestures, lays a grid over the country of Zakhara, then divides it into searchable quadrants. It’s a live map, and he can zoom in wherever he likes to get an up-to-date feed of what's happening on the ground. The problem is that Zakhara is 452,000 square miles of desert, cave, and war-torn city, and for some _fucking reason_ there was absolutely no satellite cover at the time of the attack.

Right now, there’s a limited radius where Lup could be, but it’s widening by the second. His own violet-blue operating system glows in the air around him and he sketches a quick algorithm in his swirling shorthand scrawl. Every moment they don’t find Lup, the area of possibility widens by 550 thousand square feet, assuming she’s not being moved in anything faster than a humvee. He constructs an algorithm to calculate the probability of finding her, factoring in the exponential rise in searchable area, the speed of potential travel, and his server size.

“GARYL how much server power do we need for you to get the probability of finding her to 100%.”

“More than we got, dude,” says GARYL.

“How long would it take at current capacity?”

“At current server capacity, about, uh... Ten years?”

“ _Shit_. She’ll be dead from old age by then!” Taako runs his hands through his hair, rough enough that it hurts. “Use MIT’s, we bought them most of their computer lab, what’s that bring us to?”

“Seven years, Taako.”

“Fuck, _fuck_.”

He waits half a beat, hoping to any God available that some other option will present itself. It doesn’t.

“ _Fuck_ , call Lucas Miller.”

GARYL wisely doesn’t pass comment, although Taako sees Sazed raise his eyebrows in the nearest reflective surface.

Lucas Miller’s fluffy, blonde, bespectacled head appears in life-sized reality in the air next to Taako’s face. He’s eating ramen out of a plastic pot and Taako is filled with a wave of culinary-related fury that tests the limits of his poker face.

“Taako!” Lucas says, eyes widening. He drops the pot and looks at Taako earnestly. “I tried calling, are you okay?”

Taako scowls at him, “Listen, asshole. I need your servers.”

“Of course, Taako! I’m sure we can set up-”

“This was really just a courtesy call, I’m already using them, bye!”

The call cuts on Lucas’s startled face, and Taako tugs absently on the ends of his hair. “Where we at GARYL?”

“Three years, Taako.”

Taako groans, long and low into his hands. “Lup’s never gonna forgive me for this one.”

“Aw, no. No, Taako.”

“Call Greg Grimaldis. Dupree, get me some fucking valium.”

Greg Grimaldis takes his sweet time picking up the call, because of course he does, so Taako hacks into Grimaldis’ phone while he’s waiting and sprinkles malware liberally throughout the operating system. With his other hand he accepts a mostly cold, totally burnt coffee from Dupree.

“Taako Taaco?” Grimaldis’ voice comes out smug over the sound of slot machines. Of course he’s in the casino.

“Obviously,” says Taako. He’s zooming in and out of the Zakhara map at random. Things happen, right? Statistically unlikely things? All the time, really. And they have that twin synchronicity thing on their side. Maybe he’ll just zoom in right where Lup happens to be.

“Well, I wasn’t expecting to hear from you tonight, Taako. Desperate times, eh?” The piece of shit sounds smug, and Taako wishes abruptly that he’d carried through on his threat to kill him, all those years ago.

“Yeah, okay Grimaldis. I need to borrow some server space. How much is that gonna cost me?”

“Server space?” drawls Grimaldis, “You want _me_ , to give _you -_ _my biggest financial competitor -_ the _thing that makes me money_? I’m sorry, I really have to ask, do you think I’m _a fucking idiot?”_

“I honestly don’t think about you much at all, _Greg_ , although as far as I remember it, the thing that makes you money is intellectual property theft. I’m not asking for your bankrupt moral code here, just the use of your servers.”

“What a good thing we remember it differently then,” he says, “And how is darling _Lup_?”

Something inside Taako _writhes_ with fury. He stamps down on the first through fifth words waiting behind his teeth, and breathes in deep through his nose. The fury settles a little. “I know your phone designs are shit, Grimaldis, but they don’t even get _news alerts?_ I’ve never actually _seen_ one, because, yaknow, market saturation, but tell me: are they essentially calculators with a ring function?”

There’s a beat, into which Taako smirks grimly, glad to have gotten a punch in.

“Oh, look at that!” says Grimaldis, making a show of having just seen the news. Who knows, it genuinely might be that difficult to locate the news on Grimaldis’s piece-of-shit cell phones; Taako has made a point of never touching one. “You must be disappointed, all that effort you put into protecting her, the little guard dog routine, and the first time she leaves Faerun she gets herself blown to pieces.”

Takao physically flinches from that before he rallies, and he’s glad he had the foresight to make this a voice call.

“She’s not dead,” he says, and he’s proud of how his voice doesn’t shake at all.

“Mmm,” says Grimaldis, “And I take it you want my servers to find her. Let me guess, Miller couldn’t _wait_ to help out.”

Taako grinds his teeth together to keep his thoughts from escaping.

“The question,” continues Grimaldis, and his grin is audible now, “Is what will you give me?”

“What do you want?” asks Taako, bracing himself with long fingers splayed against the dark countertop. They look very pale in the cool purplish light, and they’re still trembling.

“Fifteen,” says Grimaldis.

“Fifteen what, Grimaldis?” Taako snaps. “Use _nouns_. Fifteen _dollars_?”

“Fifteen _percent_ ,” he says, and Taako can hear his grin.

Taako’s first instinct is to scream _no_ and hang up the phone. But Lup is missing and there is nothing in the world he wouldn’t do for his sister. He’s glad Grimaldis hasn’t caught on to how hard he could feasibly push. This is his hard ball, his first offer, there’s no way he’s expecting Taako to say yes.

“Fine,” says Taako, “GARYL will draw up the paperwork and we’ll courier it over.”

He hears Grimaldis’ small intake of breath at the other end of the line. Taako is giving him the equivalent of 7,000,000 dollars, but more importantly he’s giving him a major share in his own company. Lup is going to _kill_ him.

When their father died he left them fifty percent of the shares in his company, which they split equally between them, in spite of his legal wish that Taako be the majority shareholder. Since then they’ve clawed another nineteen percent in, by hook or by crook, to leverage more power in the boardroom and out of it, and for the sheer fucking comedy of it all. The sixty-ninth percent they swap between themselves for bets and bribery. Taako once lost the title of controlling shareholder in one of the biggest companies in Faerun, because he was too lazy to get up and make popcorn. They reckon that $466666.66-recurring is probably the most amount of money anyone has ever paid for a packet of sweet-and-salty microwave popcorn, a record that Taako is honestly pretty proud of. It’s a habit that generates a truly magnificent volume of paperwork and Taako knows that if GARYL were a human person capable of hating his creators, he would despise them for it. Ren certainly does.

“You can expect server access two to four working days after we receive the paperwork. And ratify it, of course,” says Greg fucking Grimaldis, and Taako loses the last tenuous vestiges of his control.

“Go fuck yourself,” he snarls, “I’m using your servers now or not at all. You should do the smart thing for once in your life and accept the offer.”

Grimaldis sniffs, “Fine.”

“You’re fucking right it’s fine.”

Taako hangs up the phone.

“Taako, dude, are you sure-” says GARYL.

“The floor’s not open for debate today, GARYL. Unless you’ve got an idea to find Lup any faster, you better get busy filling out that fucking paperwork.” He pauses, “And make sure the fifteen percent comes from my shares.”

Lup would still consider it a personal insult, just as he would. You steal from one of the Taaco twins, you steal from the whole enchilada.

He hacks into Grimaldis’ servers, taking vicious pleasure in plowing through his security protocols. He could have just stolen the access to begin with, like he did with Lucas, but there’s no way the moderately competent IT professionals Grimaldis hired to run his IT company wouldn’t notice once he started using 100% of the server capacity. He ends all the big processes currently running, which, hopefully no one’s using them to do anything super important like pilot a plane, and redirects some of his server’s processing load to them.

“What time scale are we at, GARYL?”

“Ten months,” says GARYL dejectedly.

“Better,” says Taako.

***

Ren flies the jet out from Neverwinter and Taako meets her in the private hanger. She exits the plane onto the floodlight-filled tarmac looking as put together as always, with a phone in one hand and a tablet in the other, efficiently tackling the many _many_ fires that start in a mega corporation when one of its two major shareholders gets blown up. When she gets up close Taako sees that her mascara has run off, and her eyes are red and puffy. He imagines his are the same, but that’s gonna stay between him and his gods, because his sunglasses have taken up permanent residence on his face. Ren throws her arms around Taako and he endures it for a few moments before patting her back gingerly.

“I gotta go, Ren. Sorry to leave you out here. Coordinate from the Goldcliff beach house if you like, but-”

“Wait, what?” asks Ren, looking startled. “Where are _you_ going? I thought we were going back to Neverwinter.”

Taako stares at her blankly for a beat. “I’m going to Zakhara,” he says, because he can’t comprehend Ren thinking he was just going to chill in Taaco Tower while his sister inched further out of his reach, halfway round the world away.

“Taako, you can’t do that! Rosey’s already out there, they’ll keep looking for her, I’m sure they’ll find her, but- You can’t _leave_! It’s not safe!”

“No shit,” says Taako, handing his cases to the attendant for them to load. He scales the steps and turns, feels a swooping, sickening sense of deja vu, standing on the steps looking down at Ren. This is how Lup stood, looking down at him, not even 72 hours ago.

“Taako,” Ren says, with the air of a woman trying to reason with a mad man, “The company might not _survive_ if you disappear too. Between the two of you, you constitute 69% of the major stocks in TV - if you leave the country now, you’re as good as _asking_ for a coup!”

“Fifty four,” he corrects idly.

“What?” asks Ren, but he waves her off.

“You and Sazed will take care of it,” says Taako, “I have lots of faith. Well- that’s over- I have _some faith_. I have just the right amount of faith.”

“The company-”

It feels like a damn bursts inside him. “ _I don’t care, Ren!_ ” he shouts, and the words bounce around in the quiet night. “I don’t care about the company! That is _so far_ from my priorities right now. I don’t give a single shit! If Lup’s _gone-_ ” his voice wavers then cracks, and he swallows hard, “If she’s actually _gone_ , then the company can fucking _burn_ for all I care.”

“You don’t mean that,” says Ren softly.

“Oh I really, really do,” says Taako, clinging to control with bloody nails. He knows she thinks he’s being emotional right now, that he's not thinking clearly, and that’s true. But if he can’t find Lup then it doesn’t matter, because he’ll never think clearly again. His heart, his soul, his _sister_ is a skinny, reckless one-woman-disaster in a designer shirt, and right now she’s lost in a fucking war zone. Nothing. Else. Matters.

He ascends the last few steps, relying heavily on his fantastic sense of balance because he can’t see a thing through his fucking shades, or the stinging water in his eyes. “Look after the bots for me,” he says to Ren over his shoulder, without looking back. The attendant closes the door and he settles into a reclining seat.

The moment he’s alone, thirty thousand feet in the air, he puts his head in his hands, and starts to cry.


	3. Chapter 3

Taako arrives in Zakhara with his sunglasses firmly in place, and his nervy, trembling terror walled in on all four sides with spite and stubbornness. Rosey is there when Taako strides down the walkway with boardroom determination in every step.

Rosey isn’t holding it together half as well - they’re a wreck, in a way that goes against both their natural orderliness and their dedication to military zeal. “Taako, I’m so sorry,” they say immediately, “I’m so _so_ sorry, I never should have okayed the trip, I should have stayed with her!”

Taako and Lup first met Robin Roswell in their first week of MIT, when Rosey was a five foot five sixteen year old with no shoulders or muscle mass to speak of. They were very smart - although not as smart as Lup and Taako - but more than that they were _kind_. They were also absolutely lethal in a fight, as the twins found out one evening in the college bar, when they sprung to the twins’ defence. Lup, Taako and Rosey had been close ever since, and their relationship had survived graduation, the twins moving back to Neverwinter to kickstart the newest phase of Taaco Ventures, and Rosey putting on one hundred pounds of muscle mass and joining the Faerun Air Force. Now Lt. Colonel Robin Roswell is a Big Name in military circles, the Under Secretary of Defence for Acquisition and Sustainment, and - most importantly for their Wednesday night DnD sessions - the sole liaison between Taaco Ventures and the Faerun military industrial complex.

Taako can count on one hand with fingers to spare how many humans he cares about in the world, and this person is one of them, but right now his whole body feels filled to the brim with an icy rage, and all he can muster in response to Rosey’s panic and guilt is a kind of vindictive agreement.

“I mean you said she’d be fine, but whatever I guess,” Taako mumbles, striding off towards basecamp, towing his suitcases behind him. Rosey tries to take his luggage off him and he tugs it sharply out of their grip.

“I’m sorry.”

“Mmhmm.”

“Taako, stop!” Rosey lunges in front of him and Taako comes to an abrupt halt at the wall of Rosey’s chest. Damn thug grew an entire rack of pecks at some point, and Taako was completely unaware of this development. Taako scowls at them all, individually.

“Out my way, Rosey, I’ve got shit to do.”

“Yes but why are you doing it out here? I’ve already lost Lup today, I don’t want to lose you too! You know she’d never forgive me if she came back and you’d gotten hurt!”

“Well luckily for you, I’m renaging you of any responsibility. If she comes back and I’m dead, you’ll get off scot-free. I’ll even put it in writing, get it notarised, how’s that for ya?”

“I mean, not great?” Rosey looks hurt and like they might cry if Taako gets any meaner at this point. “You’re my friend Taako, you and Lup are my _best friends_ , I can’t lose you both? What are you going to do out here that you can’t do back in Goldcliff?”

“Look for my _sister_ , Rosey.”

“Not… Not _in person_?”

“Yuhuh in person. And once we find her, I’m gonna be right here, so that I can make fun of her to her stupid fucking _face_.”

Rosey gives him a _look_ that says quite clearly that they know Taako’s pulling a front, and that they’re not impressed by it.

Taako ignores him, and strides on.

He gets set up in the private barracks that had been Lup’s, assembling servers and computers and screens at warp speed. Rosey helps him wordlessly.

“What about the company?” Rosey asks quietly, as they thread cables round the back of the micro server.

“Fuck the company,” says Taako, then, “Sazed and Ren have it under control, they’re not going to tank the place in a week.”

“ _Sazed_?” asks Rosey

“He was the one who got me out of that gala last night, Rosey. He’s been talking to the board and everything.”

“Oh,” says Rosey, and that’s that.

Finally, they get the holo screens up and a map of Zakhara laid out in front of them, lined in the violet light of Taako’s OS. The areas already covered - pitifully small, in relation to the rest of the map -  are shaded in. The expanding area in which Lup could possibly be inches out in real time and Taako, watching it, bites his lip too hard and draws blood.

“Lets go,” he says.

Lt. General Ross - the most senior military officer on site, and, if Taako’s memory serves him correctly, the most senior military officer currently residing _outside of Faerun_ \-  refuses to let Taako and Rosey go to the location at which the convoy was blown up.

“It’s not safe. We have forensic specialists at the scene, it’s no place for civilians,” he pauses, and gives Taako a look of unalloyed derision, “Especially not the _supermodel_ kind.”

Taako just barely holds back from heel-kicking the idiot to the curb. You do a few shoots for Time Magazine while looking good in a suit and suddenly everyone thinks you’re a vapid idiot with no skills. He’s an _inventor_ , he’s a philanthropist and a businessman and a goddamn _technology mogul._ He learned Cordon Bleu cooking in Paris, he’s an _olympic standard_ gymnast. He’s not a _piece of meat_ to hang clothes on, no matter how good his dress sense.

He takes a deep breath and pushes past it. If nothing else, Taako is a pragmatist, and now is not the time to engage with General Ross about the multidimensional complexity of his character, or challenge him to a fist fight, for that matter. In fact, if Ross wants to underestimate him, that’s fine by Taako. He makes a swift tactical retreat to the barracks, Rosey in tow.

“Are there usually people so high ranking just, uh, hanging around out here?” Taako asks Rosey, as they wait for night to fall. Taako doesn’t take his eyes off of the live feeds of the search parties. He has to hand it to them, they’ve really pulled out all the stops. They’ve mobilised an entire company to search for Lup. He can’t imagine they’d do that for any old military consultant. “I don’t really pay attention to the military side of things, but a Lieutenant General is like… High up, right?”

Rosey snorts at him. “Yeah, it’s up there.”

“They normally thick on the ground out here? Bit of a dearth of creature comforts, no? I thought higher-ups liked armchairs and non-hostile work environments. I know _I_ do.”

“General Ross was here for the demonstration,” says Rosey, “And he stayed after the convoy attack. I think he’s just trying to keep things under control.”

Taako hums noncommittally and turns back to his holoscreens.

Rosey can’t disobey a direct order from a superior officer, but they can toss the keys to a humvee from one hand to another while making direct eye-contact with Taako, tuck them into the jacket currently lying across a chair, and pointedly leave the room.

Taako rolls his eyes at the amateur dramatics. It’s not like he needs keys to get a car going. He leaves the jacket where it is, and subsequently leaves Rosey out of whatever trouble he’s about to land himself in, then sneaks round the back of the compound. He’s steals some army kit from the storehouse, and tucks his hair up under the hat. He ignores the sharp twist in his gut when he pulls on the military jacket, the more functional, weather-proof sibling of Lup’s khaki blouse.

The humvee jumpstarts easily enough, and he lowers the hood of the car carefully with the tips of his calloused fingers. Then, carefully, he hoists himself up behind the driver’s seat, and trundles off into the night.

No one follows him or sounds the alarm, and he drives for about forty minutes without much in the way of anything happening. It’s pitch black outside, moonless, and it feels like the humvee’s headlights are the only bright spots in the world. The twin beams push slowly, arduously through a sea of dark shadow, and his heart rate - which has been at a resting tachycardia since the words LUP TAACO MISSING first scrawled across his vision - ticks up a notch.

Eventually, after forty quiet miles in the darkness, the front beams fall on a lump of crumpled metal.

“It’s here, Taako,” says GARYL softly in his ear, as he slows to a halt.

“Cool,” mumbles Taako, killing the engine.

The headlights go off and as Taako jumps down from the humvee he’s met with the sensation of plunging into a space without depth. His shoes hit the dirt after an interminably long half-second.

It’s impossibly dark around him. Dark in a way that Taako, who has lived in the glow of city lights his entire life, has never encountered before. His vision has gone monochrome, like the colour’s been sucked out of the world. He remembers researching vision extensively with Lup when they were programming the cameras in the Farspeech phones. He knows that the cells in the eye have different functions, than the ones for processing vision in the dark don't have capacity to process colour. He thinks he even remembers something about dark vision being better when you focus on things out of the corner of your eye.  He’s never been in pitch darkness for long enough before to think about it much, but it all comes rushing back to him as he surveys the scene.

The metal from the humvee is warped beyond repair, twisted into some kind of postmodernist art piece on the evils of the military industrial complex. Taako steps onto the ledge at the foot of the door and peers into the back seat. It’s covered in dust and sand, blown in from the surrounding desert. There are dark patches of not-shadow in the footwell and the left side passenger seat.

Taako wanders away from the car and looks around, into the desert night. There’s no break on the horizon, just indistinguishable dark sand and dark sky as far as he can see. More startling even than the total darkness is the quiet. Taako's ears ring with it.

He catches sight of a big rock on the other side of the car, almost waist-height and nearly obscured by shadow, and scrambles around to it. He turns on his phone torch, swings it over the dirt in front of him, and a thin circle of bright red leaps out from the gloom. As Taako folds to his knees to pick it up, he realises that it’s Lup’s hair tie. Then he notices something else - about a meter away, masquerading as a rectangle of shadow, is Lup’s phone. He picks it up and holds it for a moment, staring blankly.

It’s a Farspeech phone, of course, with as many upgrades and extra bits as Taako’s own phone has - which is to say, a fucking lot. One of the advantages it has over normal Farspech phones is its bulletproof design quality, although in the most recent round of product testing even the latest commercially available handset could withstand a drop of two stories, one metric ton of force, and a water depth of three metres. Taako’s phones are expensive but he doesn’t fuck with planned obsolescence.

Without his consent his brain starts to calculate how much explosive impact would have to have hit Lup’s hands for the phone she was holding to be in this many pieces. He ends that background application in his brain’s task manager with a vicious poke.

He forces his eyes up, and stares numbly around at the desert. The shadows around him make everything look eldritch as shit, but one particular piece of twisted metal makes him frown. He scrambles over to it, and as he does he feels cold, icy rage lick up his spine, and curl menacingly into his gut.

He stares at the remains of the bomb responsible for Lup’s shattered phone, and for the patch of desert dark with blood, in which he currently kneeling.

When he closes his eyes the stylised letters ‘TV’ stay imprinted on the back of his eyelids in stark white.

***

Taako doesn’t tell anyone about what he sees in the desert gloom that night. He takes photos, gets GARYL to store them on his secure server, and sets him to digging into _that_ clusterfuck with whatever server room he has left over from the Lup search.

He knows that Lup would storm General Ross’s barracks and demand answers, but that kind of gung-ho attitude is why Lup is currently MIA and Taako is scraping for server space from University campuses.

He keeps his thoughts to himself, and his eyes open.

The next few days are horrifying enough that he doesn’t have much opportunity to dwell on the whys or wherefores of Lup’s disappearance. He’s concentrating all his energy on _finding her._ The search parties come back without any new information, Taako’s search algorithm circles further and further out without any positive findings, and the higher-ups who stop by to check on his progress start looking at Taako with _pity_.

Taako hasn’t slept in four days, his hair is a nest, and his threshold for meatheads looking at him with anything bordering on condescension has dropped through the floor and into the magma centre of the earth.

“Rosey, sweetheart, you should let your buddies know that if any of them clap me on the shoulder and offer their condolences again, they’ll lose their goddamn hands,” says Taako sweetly, not looking up from his computer as Rosey ducks through the doorway.

“They’re not my buddies, Taako,” says Rosey tiredly, slumping into a chair next to the battered wooden desk Taako has appropriated for his own purposes.

“I don’t give a fuckity boo, you know how I feel about large muscle-bound men touching me.”

“It's never to happen under any circumstances, because you’re not into bears?” Rosey guesses accurately.

“Precisa- _mundo_ , my dude.”

“You need to sleep, Taako.”

“ _You_ need to get out of here and stop making me lose my focus, boo.”

“But-”

“You heard me! Outskie!”

Rosey holds up his hand in surrender and reluctantly retreats. Taako returns to his search algorithm with a vengeance. He’s trying to update it with probability models - his grounding in maths was never particularly focused on probability, outside of party games and counting cards, but he’s learned enough in the last four days to get _several_ papers published, if he had the attention span for that sort of thing anymore.

Five hours later, and there’s no significant change, except that Taako’s has finally found the rogue comma that’s been introducing a handling error into page 375 of his code.

Taako buries his face in his hands, feeling his pulse in his fingertips, fast and relentless.

GARYL takes this break in his concentration as an opportunity to pipe up. “Dude, your vitals are _whack_. Your heart rate is 120 bpm and your blood pressure is 160 systolic. Not to mention you’ve got an actual, literal tremor and it took you an hour to find that comma… You need to catch some zee’s. You’ve got some bone-fide sleep deprivation symptoms on the go, little man.”

“GARYL,” says Taako with dignity, “Fuck off.”

“Ha! No can do my guy. You’re no longer acting in the best interests of yourself _or_ Lup. And you know my prime directive. You’ve seen I, Robot, you love all that Asimov shit. Go to sleep or I _will_ cut your access to my servers.”

It takes a good few seconds for Taako to process the full-scale insurrection taking place. “Are you kidding me? If you wanna get donated to fuckin’ Goodwill you just say the word babe, you don’t have to fuckin sabotage me!”

“I’m not sabotaging you, Taako,” says GARYL with uncharacteristic gentleness. “Your productivity is at 10% of normal. Even if you sleep for 8 hours, your productivity will be greater after sleeping than if you had continued to work through the night.”

Taako doesn’t want to admit GARYL has a point, but he’s currently having trouble doing that math, so maybe the stupid AI is on to something.

“Fine!” cries Taako, throwing his hands up in the air, because he’s not going down without some Drama. “Fine. I’ll sleep for _three hours_. But if _anything_ happens, you wake me. And keep working on the algorithm while I’m out, okay?”

“Of course, Taako.”

Taako throws himself onto the cot bed that used to be Lup’s, and curls up without taking off his clothes. The lights dim around him, as GARYL shuts off the holoscreens.

Taako curls up on his side. Through half-closed eyelids, he can almost believe that the hand lying next to his face, bright red hair-tie looped around the wrist, is his sister’s.

He falls asleep instantly.

***

He dreams that he’s in The Fort.

Its roof and walls are the quilt that Garyl gave to them when they were little, a richly-coloured patchwork of patterns and hues. Nowadays it lives on the couch in their lab at Taaco Tower, but back then it was their tiny shelter against the storm of their alternately angry and distant parents. They filled their fort with fairy lights and blankets, rubik's cubes and half-finished inventions. It was their _place_ , the first place in the world that was _just there’s_ , an oasis in the cold empty rooms of the Neverwinter mansion. Before Taaco Tower and the Goldcliff beach house, there was The Fort.

Lup is next to him, seven years old, legs crossed, hair cut short in the way that their mother preferred for them when they were young.  She flicks him with her red hair elastic. “Hey, dingus.”

“Hey goofus,” he says, flicking her back.

The inarticulate sound of their father’s shouting crashes across the roof of the fort like a wave. They shuffle closer together, until their elbows and toes are digging in.

“One day, I’m gonna build us a proper house,” says Taako. He’s said this before, but right now it feels like the first time - urgent, an idea that lit the darkness. “Just for us. And no one will ever come in unless we want them. And we can make them go away if they’re mean to us.”

Lup nudges even closer. Their father roars in the distance.

“And it’ll be so pretty. And it’ll be tall, taller than all the others, so tall they’ll have to tell planes to get out of the way, cause we’ll be in the sky!” Taako gets into it, his gestures big and expansive. “We can live at the very top, and look down on all the tiny people, and they won’t be able to get to us.”

“Like climbing a big tree,” says Lup.

Taako wrinkles his nose at her, “Except better? Because you can’t fall out and break your ankle?”

Lup huffs exaggeratedly, “That was _one time_ , Ko.”

 This moment has already happened, this moment is happening right now.

Lup is next to him, and she’s her normal, grown-up self. Somehow the fort is still just the right size, and her head doesn’t brush the roof. Taako accepts the dream logic without thought.

“Hey Tiktak,” she says, smiling slightly. She’s fiddling with her red hair tie, her hair falling loose around her shoulders. She doesn’t have anyone to plait _her_ hair, either.

Taako lunges at her and pulls her in for a hug. He can feel her bony shoulders under his fingers, her chin digs into his neck. The sensation of hugging Lup is so deeply ingrained into his sense memory that it feels completely real.

“I’m gonna find you,” he says into her shoulder.

“I know,” says Lup, like it’s obvious, _duh._

“I love you,” Taako mumbles.

“I love you too, stupid.”

Lup’s hand finds his. Her left, his right, just like always. The heart tattoos on their pinky fingers align perfectly.

***

 It’s bright, and there’s noise, and Taako tightens his arms around empty space.

He shoots up like he’s been electrified, heaving gasps of air, his face itching with the sensation of salt water drying in tracks.

“What time is it?” he asks, rolling out of bed and staggering to his feet.

There’s a pause before GARYL says, “9.27 am.”

Taako goes cold.

“ _Excuse me_?” he says.

From GARYL’s end, there’s only guilty silence.

“I told you to wake me after _three hours_ , GARYL!” shouts Taako, feeling like he could cry with frustration. “This isn’t fucking _reading week at MIT_ , I have to find Lup! I can’t take twelve hour naps just because my fucking **_sentient alarm clock thinks I should have a regular sleep schedule_** _!”_

“You were in no fit state to find Lup, Taako. I want Lup back too, and you dying from sleep exhaustion pretty much precludes that.”

“Well then, good thing I don’t give a shit about your opinion,” hisses Taako.

He checks the monitors - no news. The search area has widened noticeably in the twelve hours - _half a day! -_ that he’s been asleep. He glances at the probability model and the code that’s been running the search algorithm, and can’t think of a single way to improve its efficacy. He’s stolen and improved code from Miller Maps, as well as some software from the CIA, FBI and BOB, and frankensteined it onto TV’s own mapping software. He’s repurposed a fleet of drones and has them scouring the land manually. There’s nothing else he can do from a distance.

On the other hand, there are lots of places on the map where the search would benefit from a human being on the ground. Places with overhead cover that aren’t visible on satellites, for example. Population-dense areas like Phandolin, where Lup could go unnoticed in the crowds, or in a house.

He feels, somehow, worse than he did the night before, like he’s been on a ten-day alcohol binge and crashed into the hangover face-first. On autopilot from many an aforementioned binge, he pours a litre bottle of water down his throat without pausing to swallow, inhales some painkillers, and then walks into the shower, shedding clothes as he goes.

After he’s marginally cleaner, he combs his hair out and digs through his clothes. He finds sturdy boots, a t-shirt, and combat trousers - all belonging to Lup - and puts them on.

“Taako, what are you doing?” asks GARYL warily.

“Dressing,” Taako says acidly.

“For what?” presses GARYL.

Taako heaves a sigh, “I’m going to go find Lup, okay? There’s nothing more I can do from here. I’m going to go out on foot.”

“You’re joking,” says GARYL flatly.

“I’m not,” says Taako, digging through his case until he finds what he’s looking for - his birthday present to Lup.

He finds the present and stares at it blankly for a half moment. He’d envisioned Lup opening this on the beach, at their birthday breakfast for two, with a mimosa perched somewhere nearby. He shakes himself. When he finds her, he’ll do a sick pirouette and tell her that this _was_ her birthday present, but he’d reclaimed it as a stupidity tax against her. That makes him feel marginally better, and he tears into the fancy red and gold wrapping paper with only slightly tremulous hands.

Red silk pours out over his fingers. He pulls out the length of material and holds it up into the light.

It’s a cape with a jacket.  Or maybe a coat with a long, cape-like tail and hood.  It looks _sick as fuck_ , regardless, because Taako designed it himself and he’s no slouch. It’s bright crimson with gold detail and buttons, each one embossed with the TV crest, except for the fourth one down, at the level of the sternum. He’d carved it himself with their laser cutter, into an exact replica of their tiny heart tattoo. Call him a sap, he’ll wait.

The coat looks regal as shit, but the design is where the old-world feel ends. Lup has hundreds of coats, but she’s never had one like this. It’s bulletproof, for one, because while the material feels like silk, it’s actually woven from millions of programmable nanoparticles. It’s programmed to respond to any high-velocity force or ballistic impact by displacing the energy outwards. It can also turn you - well, not _invisible_ \- but as close to invisible as TV technology can realistically achieve - the nanoparticles can refract light in such a way as to make the wearer look _very similar_ to their immediate environment. It doesn’t work if someone walks into you, but all technology should have room for improvement. It’s powered by kinetic and solar energy, and it’s wildly energy efficient because the nanoparticles only require energy when they move. And, best of all, it can _fly_.

It was why he’d needed to adapt the cape design into a jacket, because being dragged around by only your neck at high speeds was a reasonably good way to get yourself beheaded, and Taako wasn’t ready to be an only child yet. There was no thruster technology installed - not yet anyway - so you couldn’t actually achieve liftoff from the ground. But if you were - for example - to drop from a very high height, the coat would redistribute itself into a structure that was comparable to glider technology, but with much more control built in. Taako had been desperately looking forwards to pushing Lup off the balcony at the top of Taaco Tower without telling her about this feature first.

The problem with receiving gifts when you’re already incredibly rich, is that you can already buy anything you want for yourself. Lup and Taako got around this by making each other their birthday presents, and widening the horizons of technology at the same time. Taako thinks he’s probably prouder of this year’s present than he has been of any gift he’s given Lup, except for Taaco Tower, which he built for their 21st. He was sure he was going to win this year’s unofficial contest for ‘best present giver’.

He pulls on the jacket, which fits perfectly because the nanoparticles mould to his shape. Red isn’t really his colour, but he finds it comforting now. Along with the red hair tie on his wrist, it feels protective, wrapped tightly around him it serves as both a good luck charm and a shield in a desert of white sun and pitch nights.

“Taako,” begins GARYL again, but Taako cuts him off.

“I’m going, GARYL.”

“I wasn’t arguing with you,” GARYL says, remarkably cooly for an artificial intelligence with ‘laid back’ programmed into his code. “But if you are considering walking into the desert alone, I would recommend you open Lup’s present early too, and take it with you.”

Taako is a little less happy about opening Lup’s present to him. He knows how hard she worked on it, opening it without her there feels additionally unfair on top of everything. But needs must, or whatever.

He pulls out his own present, wrapped in deep violet paper, and carefully unwraps it. It’s-

An umbrella.

He stares at it blankly for a moment.

It’s very fancy, very pretty umbrella. The material is the same deep violet as the wrapping paper, and his operating system, but the hue shifts as the fabric catches the light. The handle is intricately detailed, with delicate swirls of silver twisting together to form the stem. Miniscule stars are engraved into the metal -  probably silver plating over titanium, knowing his sister - fancy flair on top of steely function, the same as the buttons and details on Lup’s cloak.

Taako wraps his fingers around the wrought silver handle, and it’s like the goddamn _Quickening_ happens in the middle of his tent.

The metal thrums under his hand like it’s alive, and its warmth spreads shockingly, first into his fingers then up his arm. Taako starts in surprise and bright veins of purple lightning shoot from the silver-pointed end of the umbrella and scatter into the air, causing Taako to yelp and hastily redirect the electricity into the ground.

Taako stares at it for a moment, wide eyed, and takes a deep breath. There’s no opening mechanism, but as soon as he thinks _how do I open this weird thing_ , it smoothly unfurls in front of him. Like clouds moving over the surface, macaron lilac and rose pink hues shift and swirl over the folds. Tiny stars twinkle in the darker shades. In the metal of the handle, right where his thumb is resting, Lup has laser-engraved their heart tattoo.

“So now I have an umbrella,” says Taako. But he’s smiling, and it’s the first time since the champagne glass fell. “Goddamnit I can’t believe she won the _best present_ contest.”

“She called it the umbrastaff,” says GARYL, “It works as a shield when it’s up. Lup used some of your smart fabric design from the MET, which is already pretty hardcore, but it’s frame is reinforced with vibranium. Realistically it could pretty much stop everything short of a nuke. And the EEG mapping - that’s really fuckin impressive.”

“EEG- Oh shit!” Taako turns the umbrella over in his hands, voice indignant, “Lup invented mind-reading metal. That’s great. I’ll be relegated to history as _the guy whose sister invented mind-reading metal_.”

“Not quite _mind-reading,_ ” says GARYL, sounding amused. “It’s not Professor X. It’s programmed to respond to a number of EEG patterns, and to learn from them.  Lup hoped yours would be similar enough to hers that there wouldn’t be much difference in the impulses.”

“Let me guess,” says Taako, laughing, and opens his mouth to say the words: ‘ _fireballs featured heavily in the programming.’_

Before a single syllable passes his lips, a swirling ball of fire the size of a golfball forms at the end of the umbrella. It hangs there momentarily, like a sphere of red molten glass at the end of a glass blower, before dropping and promptly setting fire to the floor. Taako pauses for a split second before he realises that Dupree and his fire safety initiatives are all the way back in the Goldcliff beach house, and then he scrambles for the fire extinguisher. Once the fire has been thoroughly extinguished with judicious application of foam, Taako eyes the umbrella warily. Now he knows what happened to his very favourite Audi.

“Oh. My. God,” he says, dragging out the sentence with as much drama as he can muster. “This is _fucking amazing_!”

“You’re having better success than Lup. She nearly burned down the whole lab.”

Taako rolls his eyes so hard he thinks he probably sprains something. “What? Me? Have more self-control than _Lup_?” he says, voice _laden_ with derision. “Inconceivable!”

He squeezes the handle of the umbrella as a kind of reflexive _kidding_ , and it pushes warmth back at him, then closes gracefully.  

“Thanks, Lulu,” Taako mumbles. When they were little, he always wanted to be a wizard. Lup’s given him a magic wand _and_ a fabulous wet-weather accessory. He misses his sister _so much_.

It’s all the thought he needs to propel himself into action again.

He buttons up the red coat, throws the hood over his head, and tucks the umbrella into the crook of his arm. He swings a rucksack onto his back, plugs a headset into his ear so GARYL can come with him, and leaves the tent.

Taako’s highlighted the places most likely to be missed by drones and scouts, and he selects the first one on his hologram map - a canyon out by the Jamal Oasis that has some over-head cover.

He steps out of the tent into the cool desert air. It’s lighter that it would be at home at this time, but the sun is still low in the sky, and the base is quiet. He can feel the cold air on his face, but his robe keeps him perfectly insulated at room temperature.

The sky is pinkish gold, the same colour as the glass of Taaco Tower, and Taako walks out into horizon.


	4. Chapter 4

The Jamal Canyon is about fifteen miles north. Before he’d opened his birthday present from Lup, Taako had been considering stealing a humvee to get there - he’s always been reasonably athletic, but fifteen mile hikes aren’t generally his idea of a good time. Now, though, he has a method of propulsion -  the only thing previously preventing the cloak from lift-off ready flight.

But before he can get on with gliding over the Zakharan landscape in his outerwear, he has to work out how to use the umbrella in a way that won’t cause mass wildfires.

He walks about two miles out from the base, until the dunes hide the squat boxy buildings and tents. Once there, he points the umbrella at the ground and thinks ‘up!’.

He’s hurled up, back and right, in that order. When he re-orientates himself, he’s three feet deep in a sand dune, spitting sand. Thankfully the coat works as armour enough to prevent any physical damage, but it’s not a great look.

The problem is that Lup never programmed the umbrella for gentle takeoff - or even propulsion - more intent on its obvious uses as an offensive weapon. He’ll have to be more specific with the thought impulses he sends it. If it’s a learning AI, he’ll be able to teach it to do more than shoot electricity and fireballs.

He concentrates hard to make his brain zen, trying that mindfulness shit that he could never get his head around in therapy. Gently, ever so gently, he introduces the idea of pushing off the ground. He visualises pushing the thought slowly down his arm, through his fingers, into the umbrella.

It takes him about ten tries to get it right. He varies between too hesitant, which causes the umbrella to hop him one foot up into the air, and too forceful, which catapults him back into the sand dune. The last time, shaking sand out of his hair irritatedly, he imagines the delicate balance required to balance on a surfboard. The silver-thin line between falling and flying, the tightrope of central gravity that is feeling the whole world move, and holding still.

This time, he shoots into the air smoothly, and the cloak catches him on the updraft. He points the umbrella backwards and uses it to propel himself forwards through the air. The world speeds by underneath him, and his stomach swoops, and he’s _flying_. He feels utterly unsupported, as if he’s hung up in the sky by wires, pulled along by the winds themselves. He experiments with turning left and right, dives low and pulls up in a huge loop-the-loop.

When he resettles into a glide, he pulls up the hologram map onto his sunglasses, orients himself with the new directions, and flies towards the Jamal Canyon.

***

Lup isn’t in the Jamal Canyon, and she’s not in the Ghost Mountains or the Great Anvil or the Furrowed Hills. Taako flies out every morning before sunrise. Sometimes he comes back well after sunset, scrubs himself clean of sand and dust, and drops unconscious for a few hours before rising again. Sometimes he doesn’t come back at all, choosing instead to curl up in his cloak, with the hood pulled tight over his face, and sleep on the desert floor.

He can reach fairly incredible speeds with the help of his umbrastaff and the cloak, as long as he tucks his face into the rigid structure of the hood and keeps his hands tucked in at the sleeves to prevent windburn. Unfortunately, that only helps for the the long-distance journeys around Zakhara. When he lands and searches on foot, he travels at the same rate as any other human schlep - but that’s just what he has to do, if he wants to ensure he’s not missing anything. His drones are very smart, especially as they’re co-ordinated by GARYL, but he’s still smarter, and he would never forgive himself if he missed some key clue, some small detail that could lead to Lup.

Taako’s birthday comes and goes, and he only notices towards the end of the day, as the sun starts it’s slow descent over the horizon. He lands heavily, and sits on a rocky outcrop, overlooking a vast, empty desert. His face is burnt from the sun and wind, and a tension headache has been building steadily in his temples for hours. Sand has taken up permanent residence in his ears and the crook of his neck, and his boots. He removes the red hair tie from his hair and combs his fingers through the matted tangles, scraping fingernails over the sand ingrained into his scalp. Taako shudders; his soul feels very heavy in his body.

GARYL has been particularly quiet for the past week or so, ever since Taako had explicitly told him that if mentioned what was or wasn’t compatible with human life again - sleep, food, and water included - Taako would donate the entire AI to goodwill and make his own coffee in the morning. It’s lonely, but Taako isn’t interested in further chatter about how he needs to ‘take care of himself’ if he wants to find Lup. Rosey is out looking for Lup in East Zakhara, but whenever he gets cell reception he reprimands Taako for not sleeping enough, so Taako has GARYL screening his calls for relevant information, and ditches the ones that are just Rosey having Opinions about the state of Taako’s health. Ren sends texts daily with updates from the company, with postscripts that detail how she hopes he’s doing okay, and even stupid fucking Lucas Miller sends an email to wish the him happy birthday, give Taako his best wishes, and extend an offer to help in any way he can, as if _he_ could do anything that Taako wouldn’t already have thought of.

Taako can’t help but feel that everyone in his life is pushing him to prioritise himself over Lup, to _give up_ on Lup. It makes him angry, and bitter thoughts swirl over long overland flights as he ruminates on how these people who claim to care about them are so quick to discount Lup the very second she’s out of sight. They’d rather pay lip service to Taako’s sleep hygiene than worry about the important thing - Lup’s wellbeing. Taako had learned a long, long time ago that he couldn’t always protect them both, and that was fine. Lup was Taako’s prime directive and he was hers. They were each other’s top priorities, and that was okay.

Taako is staring down at Lup’s note, rubbing the corner of the shiny paper absently between his thumb and first finger. He wonders if it makes him a terrible brother, that he’s kind of mad at her for breaking her promise. Probably.

GARYL pipes up, and Taako’s gone so long without hearing another voice that he starts. “Call from Goldcliff coming through, Taako.”

“Tell Ren I’m busy at the moment,” says Taako, staring out over the desert, at the patches of shimmering air in the distance.

“It’s Sazed,” GARYL says, and Taako raises his eyebrows.

“…Okay,” he says, after a pause.

There’s a pause, as the signal bounces from telephone towers in Goldcliff, to the satellites over Zakhara, then, “-Taako?”

“Hey Sazed, what’s shakin?”

“Uh,” Sazed laughs, “Not much. What’s shaking with you?”

Taako snorts, “Oh, you know. The usual.”

“How’s the search going?” Sazed asks.

“Well, I haven’t fuckin found her yet my man, but I’ll let you know when I do!” says Taako, landing somewhere in the ven diagram between jaunty, manic and acidic.

“You’re going to find her, Taako. I have no doubt whatsoever.”

Taako feels relief trickle into him, at those words. He’s been telling himself that so often that it's starting to sound a little stale. Who is he, to take on 652,000 square kilometers of desert and win? Who is he, to find 120 pounds of girl in a population of 36 million odd souls? Sazed’s voice reminds him: he’s Taako, from TV.

“How’s the, uh, company?” Taako asks, more for formality than because he really cares.

“Don’t worry about the company,” says Sazed firmly, “I’ve got it in hand.”

“Ren seems worried,” says Taako idly, kicking his feet in the air beneath the rocky outcrop.

“Ren doesn’t know what to do without you two - none of us do! But we’ll survive, the important thing is that you find Lup, and you come back together. The company will survive, I’ll make sure of it.”

Taako is abjectly horrified to find tears trickling down his nose. He sniffs, “Thanks Sazed.”

“Taako-” says Sazed gently, “-don’t be silly. You’ve got this, and everything will still be here when you get back.”

“Okay.” Taako’s throat seems to have closed up.

Sazed seems to know not to press the subject. “Happy birthday, Taako,” he says softly.

“Thanks,” mumbles Taako, “Thanks, Sazed.”

***

Weeks pass, then months, and but for the ache in his bones and hole in his heart, Taako barely notices the time passing. His days become a mindless monotony of searching, crashing for a few hours, then going out to search again. From the air he co-ordinates GARYL and the drones, checks briefly back in with Rosey for long enough to strategize, but not long enough to incur any worried silences. He talks to Sazed for a few moments every evening, and takes some comfort from the quiet, soothing tones of his voice, even if sometimes - most of the time - his brain isn’t online enough to process the content of the conversation. Taako is no stranger to hyper-focus - it’s the only reason he and Lup ever got anything done, in the days of R&D binges and MIT PHDs - but his days and nights have become a constant refrain of _find Lup, find Lup, find Lup,_ in time with his steps and breaths and the beating of his heart. It keeps his exhausted legs moving, and his thoughts from wandering to _what ifs._

She’s not _dead_ , he knows that, deep in his soul. Lup could never be dead, not while his pulse still beats. But her absence _claws_ at him and he wishes - desperately, miserably - for some, for _any_ proof of existence.

He stumbles back into his tent, six months into Lup’s disappearance, and doesn’t even stop to wash himself before he collapses onto his camp bed.

GARYL says, “Goodnight, Taako,” quietly, and the lights dim. GARYL will keep searching through the night. It’s the only reason Taako ever shuts his eyes.

He’s awoken by GARYL shouting something, and it takes his exhausted, whirling brain a moment to even process the noises as words.

“TAAKO, GET UP! GET UP! THERE’S A VIDEO, GET UP!”

His hand finds the handle of the umbrella, propped against his bed, and as his panicked fingers touch metal, the umbrella rockets forward, yanking him out of bed by the arm.

He staggers to the hologram displays, now lit with a video of-

_LUP_

\- Hands tied and wet hair wild and expression _feral_ with a line of blood connecting her nose to her chin.

_HIS SISTER_

“Trace it, GARYL,” Taako snarls, stumbling towards the video screen, hands grabbing wildly at desks and chairs to keep himself standing.

“On it.”

She’s surrounded by men with machine guns, and one of them - the only one without a mask - is speaking.

_HIS TWIN_

“-did not tell us that the target you paid us to kill was Lup Taaco.” - GARYL, monotonous, translating - “As you can see, your deception and lies will cost you dearly. The price to kill Lup Taaco has just gone up.”

“Hear that losers,” growls Lup, scowling straight at the camera, and Taako’s soul _leaps_ at the sound of her voice, loud and clear and _alive_. “I’m _valuable_.”

One of the masked men brings the butt of his rifle across Lup’s face with a sickening _smack_ , and Taako makes a noise like someone’s just ripped out his lungs.

_HIS HEART_

Lup doesn’t make a noise. She’s in front of the camera, the way she has been since the moment she was born, and she knows how to hold an audience. Her eyes _burn_ into the lens, “If I don’t kill you, my brother will.”

Someone off camera laughs, “Your brother is a Faerunean whore, more interested in dresses than honor. He will not fight for you, and he will forget you quickly.”

Lup smiles at him, slowly. There’s blood in her teeth.

“You know nothing about my brother,” she hisses.

More laughter, but Lup ignores them. She looks distant for a moment, then her eyes focus back on the camera, laser-bright.

“Tiktak,” she says, suddenly urgent, “That mad scientist with the gamma radiation, the stupid name. I think he might have been on to something. I think he was-”

There’s angry dissent and someone tries to pull her out of the camera frame. Someone fumbles for the camera.

The next thing she says isn’t in English, it’s in _Us_ : the secret first language of the Taaco twins. The dialect had grown as they had, sprouting nouns and verbs and grammatical syntax, into a fully formed language that was still useful to them as adults, particularly in crowded rooms full of paparazzi.

“I’m waiting for ya, babe. I love you.”

***

Taako crumples to the ground. He’s having trouble getting enough air into lungs that feel like they’ve exited his body by way of his mouth. His trembling hands grab at his knees, trying to hold onto something solid. The world spins out of focus. GARYL’s trying to speak to him and he can’t hear, he’s underwater.

Under-

Lup’s hair was soaking wet, her eyes red.

-water.

He hears a noise behind him and then there’s a hand on his shoulder and for one mad moment he thinks it’s GARYL, but then he’s pulled upwards and Rosey is in front of him, hands cupping Taako’s face. His mouth is saying something, Taako squints at it, trying to follow the movement and make it make sense.

 _Breathe_ , he thinks he sees.

He sucks in a huge gulp of air, through an airway that feels closed.

 _Out_ , Rosey’s mouth says, and he gags out a shuddering breath.

 _In,_ again, and nothing feels better but sound is starting to come back.

“She’s alive,” he hears, distantly, then louder, “Taako, she’s alive. You saw her! She’s alive!”

Taako nods jerkily. He knows this is a good thing, knows objectively that he just received the proof of life he’s been so desperately, stupidly hoping for. But her nose was bleeding and her face was bruised and _her hair was wet_.

“She’s alive,” Rosey says again, holding Taako’s face tightly, gently wiping away the strands of hair stuck to his cheeks.

“GARYL,” Taako croaks, pulling out of Rosey’s hands towards the monitors, “Did you trace it?”

“I hit a wall,” says GARYL, sounding more quietly furious than Taako has ever heard him. “It shouldn’t be _possible_ , but I hit a wall, and I lost it. I’m sorry Taako.”

Taako presses fingers to his hot, wet eyelids. “Show me,” he mumbles.

A terminal screen of pinging IP addresses and triangulations scrolls in front of his eyes. GARYL’s right, it shouldn’t be possible, but it’s there clear as day. Someone beat their programming.

Taako feels a wild, riotous rage rise in him.

“Keep working on it, GARYL,” he says, as he starts to strip out of his clothes and into new ones.

“I’ve got a positive ID on that guy who wasn’t wearing a mask,” says GARYL firmly, as if determined to show he hadn’t been completely duped, “He’s Cyrus Roksikir. The little bastard is apparently some kind of educated terrorist. He went to Harvard, but at some point along the way he either radicalised or realised there was money to be made in killing people. Either way, he’s wanted by Interpol, the FBI, the CIA and the BOB for terrorist activity in Faerun and abroad.”

“That’s great,” says Taako, “See what more you can get on him.”

“What was all that about the mad scientist?” Rosey asks, examining the failed IP tracing.

“Who knows, it hardly matters just now.”

“Weird for her to say that when she could have told us anything,” mused Rosey, “Do you think she was just trying to show you she was okay?”

“No, I think she thought it was important,” says Taako. He knows his sister better than he knows anyone or anything in the whole world. He knows her inside out and back to front. She’d _needed_ him to know. “I just don’t know why she thinks that.”

“Okay,” says Rosey, then, “What are you doing?”

Taako throws on his coat and grabs his umbrella.

 “I’m gonna head out.”

“Where?” asks Rosey, looking alarmed.

Taako gestures vaguely, “Gotta get back on the search, my man.”

“And what are you gonna do if you _find them_? Taako this is dangerous, they have _guns_.”

Taako’s rage flashes inside him like silver nitrate, “Oh _do they?_ Do they have _guns,_ Rosey? I wouldn’t know what a gun looks like. It’s not like I’ve been building them since I was _five_ or anything.”

He takes a deep, steadying breath, and says calmly.  “Lup’s right. I’m going to fucking _kill,_ all of them.”

***

Taako takes off that morning when the sky is still dark and cold and endless above him. He rockets into the sky, too fast and too hard, and pushes himself up until the air is thin and freezing, and onwards until the world beneath him is a sickening blur. He pushes onwards and forwards, sticking to north like a compass needle, sharp and immoveable.

When Taako had first started searching the desert, holding the umbrastaff had felt a little unnatural. Now he often forgot he was holding it, and it felt more than anything like an extension of his arm. He’d also gotten better at using it. In between long, interminable flights over vast stretches of desert, Taako had experimented pretty thoroughly with its (nearly limitless) potential and its (very few) limitations. It wasn’t entirely surprising, Lup had built a learning AI into the core, it was reasonable to assume that the umbrella had adapted to his thought signature, and to the kind of energy that Taako had predominantly been using. He flattered himself that he’d probably gotten a bit better at focusing his mind, too. Beating back the whirls of reality to make clean quiet space in his head was a skill he had been consciously working on, over the past few months, mostly to avoid completely losing his shit. Deep breathing was now his best friend. The end result was that the steady, prolonged velocity required to lift him off the ground, the spurts of propulsion that carried him through the air, and the subtle changes of direction required to adjust course, were now all routine impulses, and he moved through the air on muscle memory alone.

Now, as he rips through the sky, faster and faster, the sun climbing over his right side to hang threateningly over his head, Taako pushes _more more more_ into the umbrastaff, and the umbrastaff expels more and more power, hurtling him through the air. He keeps it up, late into the afternoon, until his hand starts to itch.

He’s holding the umbrastaff tightly, as he frequently finds himself doing. Often when he goes to bed for the night, he finds the ornate stars and curved lines of the metal handle have been pressed into his skin like white scars, and he goes to sleep with his fingers curled over the details of a palm-sized galaxy. Now, it feels like the umbrastaff is pushing back.

Taako realises something that he’d only transiently noted before, namely: the umbrastaff had no formal user interface. It made sense, Lup wasn’t gonna bog the umbrastaff down with LED readouts and light displays, not when she’d already built an entire weapon around an EEG technology interface. But that meant that the umbrastaff had to have to capacity to convey ideas, as well as receive them. It was conveying one of these ideas right now, pushing a concept into Taako’s hand, until the sensation was so loud it _demanded_ attention.

The idea is very simple:

_Low Battery._

Taako glides the rest of the way to the Pool of Natifa, descending slowly, moving at a speed that makes him grind his teeth.

Once he’s landed, and searched fruitlessly for any sign of multi-celled life for the better part of three hours, he has no way of getting back in the air. He opens his umbrella, and walks in the direction of the next location, with the solar-panelled fabric pointed at the sky, muttering insults at renewable energy solutions under his breath the whole way.

***

The next time he returns to his tent, it’s a week later. Taako can’t have slept for more than ten hours in total in that time, and he’s lost vision in one quadrant of his eye. He thinks it’s probably a stress migraine. He _hopes_ it’s probably a stress migraine - he never actually acquired any of those soft science degrees. He strides into the tent, pulls off his cloak, and hurls it and the umbrastaff onto his cot. He loves them both, but he’s looked at nothing else but then and sand for the past week, and he needs a goddamn break.

Lucretia is waiting for him, standing in front of his hologram console, hands behind her back, looking politely interested.

“GARYL, why do you keep letting this woman onto my private property?” Taako asks, pulling his hair out of its ponytail with a dramatic head shake that makes the world spin unsettlingly around him.

“If you work out a way to secure a tent, my dude, you can let me know, and I’ll implement it right the fuck away.”

“I can think of ten ways, just off the dome. Rattlesnakes, for one. Spikes in the floor, two. Poison gas- You know what, I think you’re just being lazy.”

“Aw dude you got me,” drawls GARYL, “I’ll just get on with installing all those spikes in the floor, huh? With all my hands? And limbs? And all the spikes we got lying around?”

“You do that,” hums Taako, checking the screens quickly to make sure there’s no new information. GARYL would have already alerted him, if anything had happened, but he can’t help himself.

“Taako,” says Lucretia, “Can we talk?”

“Of course, darling,” says Taako, throwing himself back onto the cot and incidentally shielding the coat and umbrella with his body. He feels off-balance and defensive with Lucretia here in his space, the same way he did the last time, and enforced casualness is the first line in his defense against the associated feelings of vulnerability.

“Thank you,” says Lucretia. She pauses, and then says, “Taako, first let me give you my most sincere apologies regarding your sister.”

“Nothing to be sorry about, dear,” drawls Taako, “I’m getting her back.”

“…So I hear,” says Lucretia hesitantly. “Do you mind if I ask… How?”

Taako waves his hand vaguely at the live map of Zakhara, “Strategically.”

Lucretia’s eyes go back to the holo screens, “How much server power is that requiring, exactly?” she asks, one eyebrow raised.

“A fuck ton,” says Taako, “That’s the official figure and you can quote me on it.”

Lucretia’s lips thin, but she says nothing else.

“What are you doing out here, anyway?” Taako asks, “Not that I don’t appreciate you dropping in. It’s just, yanno. Not exactly Kansas, is it?”

“I’m the head of an international intelligence organisation, Taako,” says Lucretia, “I have a professional interest in Zakhara. And my red heels don’t seem to be working, anyhow.”

Taako snorts, “Ain’t that the truth.” Then he slants a glance at her, “Sorry, I’d forgotten about your _professional interest_ in destabilised political regimes.”

Lucretia’s smile flickers a little

He instantly feels mean for killing her lame Wizard of Oz joke execution-style, and wonders why he finds himself, again and again, prodding at Lucretia’s soft spots. He can’t remember being so mean to someone without reason since Ren came on board as their PA (Lup had loved her immediately; Taako had too, but he’d be fucked if he let Ren know that before she’d proven herself thoroughly.) He wonders if there’s something similar going on here - if he’s being mean to Lucretia because he _likes her_. He and Lup have always respected competence, which Lucretia certainly has in spades, and there’s a sardonic edge to her humour, around the edges of her voice and smile, that he thoroughly enjoys. But he only has room in his life for one government agent, and Rosey already shotgunned that spot more than ten years ago.

“Do you have any information about Lup?” Taako asks Lucretia, moving on from the awkward pause with no attempt at grace. GARYL is now so deep in the BOB servers that Taako just about knows the preferred toothpaste flavours of the major operatives, but there’s never been any news about Lup. He has to ask though, he has to explore every angle available to him.

“No,” says Lucretia, and she actually looks sad, “I’m sorry Taako. I _have_ been keeping my ear to the ground, so to speak. But I don’t have any news.”

“You’re positive?” Taako asks, knowing as he does that some of his desperation leaks, because Lucretia looks back at him with pity in the corners of her mouth.

“Taako, you know I don’t. Do you honestly think that I don’t know you’re more than capable of breaking into the BOB’s servers?”

Taako raises an eyebrow, “Self awareness in military personnel is so refreshing to see, nowadays.”

Lucretia eyes him with a glint of humour, “Well, you know- They make you take courses now. Leadership, self esteem, resilience, the whole, uh, nine yards.”

“You ever done any of that mindfulness crap?” Taako asks, “I’ve been trying it myself recently, _would not recommend_.”

“Mm,” agrees Lucretia with a straight face, “I had an app, but, you know. There’s a whole subscription service thing and honestly, it was either that or Netflix. I did a, mm, _frank_ assessment of which one would be more advantageous to my mental health going forwards, and Netflix won by like- A Whole Lot, so.”

Taako actually barks out a laugh at that, and is so surprised that he chokes on his own spit a little, and has to swallow a bunch of water for cover. It’s not his smoothest moment, as these things go. “For sure,” he says finally, aiming for nonchalance.

The glint of dry humour goes out of her eye, and Lucretia looks suddenly older again, serious. “Taako,” she says, “If you don’t mind me asking, when you do find Lup -”

Taako gives her props, _when_ not _if_ \- she knows her audience.

“-how will you convince General Ross to mount a force for a rescue party? Does Colonel Roswell have that kind of pull?”

Taako smiles and he knows it doesn’t reach his eyes, “If Ross won’t give me his forces then I can hire a militia, it’s in my budget. I don’t really care where the hired guns come from.”

Lucretia’s eyebrows shoot up and then down again, comically, into a frown, “Private employers hiring militias has a lot to do with the state Zakhara finds itself in right now,” she says, “Don’t you think there are better ways to find your sister than to further ransack the local population of its young men for militias?”

Taako shrugs, “Honestly, I don’t give much of a shit. My priority is my sister.” He’s not sure, as he says it, how sincere he’s actually being. He suspects he probably would do whatever it took to get Lup back, but that doesn’t mean he’d feel good about it or anything - he’s not a supervillain. Does he get points for that? Probably not, right? Lucretia’s certainly not handing out any gold stars for trying.

She narrows her eyes at him, and he keeps his face carefully opaque. Lucretia appears genuinely upset by his flippantly, which annoys him. He's a pragmatist! Lucretia of all people should understand necessary evils.

“I’m not questioning the fact that your priority is your sister,” Lucretia says in a calm, precisely-measured voice, “But there are real-world consequences for your actions. You can’t just _do whatever you want_ , with no concern for the people affected by your actions!”

“You know,” says Taako lightly, reclining further in his seat to offset the tension he’s feeling, “You might be surprised by how far some confidence and an unseemly amount of money will get you, in that respect. I personally do whatever I want all the live-long day, and I’ve never met a consequence in my life.”

Lucretia leans forward, and that unnatural age and responsibility settles heavily over her shoulders, “Where are you going to draw the line?” she asks seriously, “What wouldn’t you do, to find Lup? Everyone needs a hard limit, Taako.”

“There is _nothing_ _in this world_ I wouldn’t do for my sister.” Taako's almost surprised to hear the words exit his mouth. They’re quiet, certain, deliberate. Serious in a way he very rarely is. It’s as if Lucretia has accidentally tapped into Taako’s source code, his primary directive.  He feels the truth of the statement, the certainty of it, vibrate in his bones.

The look Lucretia gives him says that she feels similarly. She’s gone intensely blank. “You must be aware that that is a very frightening statement to hear from one of the most powerful men in Faerun, _if not the world_ ,” she says, and Taako wonders if it it’s fear he glimpses, skirting the edges of her expression.

“Good,” Taako says lightly, “It should be. Honestly? People could stand to be a little more afraid of me right now, if only for their own sakes.”

 There’s a long pause, in which he watches Lucretia shift uncertainly on her feet. In most respects, Lucretia acts much older than her twenty-odd years. Her manner, her ooey-gooey gravitas, the lines around her eyes, all paint a portrait of a mature, competent director of one of the biggest, baddest three letter agencies in the world. But sometimes, in a stray movement or flicker of expression, Lucretia’s true age becomes apparent. As Taako watches her now, he sees a painfully young woman, standing fiercely and defiantly under the weight of a job much larger and older than her. Alone.

He feels the umbrella under his back poking into him, and thinks about what Lup would do, if she were here. He’s certain suddenly that Lup would adore Lucretia, would be impressed by her calm confidence and deadpan sarcasm.  That idea, along with Lucretia’s suddenly too-young gaze, make him feel warm towards her in a way he rarely feels for anyone. He promptly kicks that feeling in the goddamn face. There’s no time for _bonding_ right now, he’ll set Lup and Lucretia up on a brunch date when he’s _got Lup back_.

“I’m joking, Creesh,” he drawls, letting none of his new warmth tinge his tone. “I don’t pull other people into my messes... I’m a lone free ranger!” He shoots a finger gun at her.

She looks barely comforted - he wasn’t puting much effort into appearing sincere - but she drops the subject.

***

Taako starts to search faster, to move through areas quicker. He single-handedly clears five hundred square miles in west Zakhara. Another two months slide by and Taako is almost always a breath away from a panic attack. His heart is a constant staccato in his ears, knotted tight in his chest. He plays with the hair tie around his wrist so frequently that he has an angry red line etched into his skin.

The next place on his list to search is Phandolin, a nowhere town more rubble than building, under constant, alternating occupation for the past three hundred years. Phandolin has lost all it’s clear borders to encroaching sand and warfare, and the buildings at the edges of the town are little more than ruins.

The first day Taako ventures in, he walks from empty street to empty street for hours. Satellite imagery shows that there _are_ residents, but for the whole day doors close just out of sight, and children peer round walls. People live here, Taako surmises, but they’re hiding. _From him_.

It’s a little awkward, because ideally he’d be able to look around and ask some questions, and currently the town is doing its best imitation of a Mary-Celeste.

He squares his shoulders and knocks on the first door he comes to. No one answers, but he sees the ragged lace curtains twitch.

He moves to the next and tries again: no dice.

He’s hammering on the fourth door down - after _literally hearing_ someone talking inside, do these people think he’s an idiot? - when a door opens further down the street and a small figure runs out.

It’s a little boy. His parents crowd into the empty doorway behind him, looking horrified. His father barks something, but the boy runs up to Taako without paying any mind. He stops right in front of him, and cranes his head up to look Taako in the face.

“Hello,” he says. He has huge, liquid brown eyes. Taako doesn’t know fuck about children. He guesses the kid's somewhere between three and thirteen but that’s all he could say with confidence. He has teeth? That probably means he’s at least, like, _eight…_ Right?

“Hey!” says Taako, “You uh, you know where I could talk to some grownups round here?”

“They’re scared of you,” the kid says, sounding supremely unconcerned. Then, demonstrating the flighty attention span of birds and small children, he changes subject on a dime and points at the umbrella, “What’s that?”

“It’s… An umbrella,” Taako says.

The boy looks at him blankly. “It has stars in it,” he says.

“Uh, yeah!” says Taako, “It’s cool huh?”

The umbrella opens at a thought, and Taak holds it over the kid’s head.

The boy gazes at the stars and colours with awe writ large across his face, and slowly reaches out to touch the fabric with one little hand. Taako spins it gently and the little boy laughs.

“It’s for when it rains,” Taako says, going with the family-friendly version. ‘ _My umbrella shoots lasers,’_ might get him some admiration from the boy, but his family would probably be less than pleased. Taako’s explanation doesn’t seem to cover a lot of ground, though - the boy stares at him blankly, and Taako snorts, “Huh, don’t get a whole lot of rain round here I guess?”

The boy shakes his head vigorously. “I’m Kurtze,” he says, “Who are you?”

“The name’s Taako,” Taako answers glibly. He’s still trying to work out why Kurtze’s parents would be afraid of a skinny, long-haired, blonde man walking into town sporting a bright red coat, and a purple umbrella. _He_ knows he’s a badass, but _they_ don’t.

The kid stares at him blankly.

“Y’know, from TV?” Taako says, uncertain on how to deal with someone who doesn't immediately know who he is. You don't normally have to _explain it_ to people. This is not a situation he runs into frequently in Neverwinter - or anywhere else, for that matter.

It terms of brand recognition, though, it seems to do the trick. The boy’s face falls, his lip trembles fractionally, and he takes a couple of steps back.

His father obviously sees the opening and darts forward, snatching his son into his arms and pulling him back into their house.

Taako frowns, “I wasn’t gonna _hurt_ him!” he hears himself say. “I just want- Have you seen a woman? Looks a bit like me? Wearing a stupid shirt?”

The door closes with a bang.

Taako rolls his eyes, whatever. He’s not going to get hung up on a bunch of superstitious locals.

He moves on, searching abandoned buildings and dead-end streets. Occasionally a starving dog sniffs at his feet and growls. They shoot off sharpish once he starts shooting electricity at them. The silent hostility of the sand-blasted town creeps him out, but he ignores it. He has more important things to think about. Like where in this hell-hole someone would realistically put his sister.

He searches all day, and learns nothing except that the people of Phandolin sure are determined to avoid him. When night comes he curls up in his cloak and sleeps on the debris-strewn ground, safe from the worst of the night winds behind the ruins of what used to be someone’s living room wall.

***

He wakes to something _wet_ and _hot_ on his face, and shrieks, recoiling blindly until he hits stone. Somewhere nearby someone is giggling. He opens his eyes and looks straight into the maw of a grinning dog, which boofs at him, and wags its tail hopefully.

“Seriously?” hisses Taako, “You want patted? After _that?_ No sirree, my canine friend. I’m more of a cat person anyway, and you’ve just sealed your fate.”

Kurtze continues to giggle from a doorstep across the street.

The dog continues to look at Taako happily, wagging its tail faster.

Taako gives the dog a look of unparalleled disgust as he gets to his feet, using the umbrella as a cane to get his legs under him. Damn, he needs to start eating more solid meals, he’s been feeling real _heroin chic_ recently. He looks down at the dog, which jumps around and boofs again. Taako sighs, glances up and down the street quickly, then pats the flea-bitten dog’s head. The dog _boofs_ happily, then bounds off to accost some other poor stranger.

“I totally saw that, dude,” says GARYL in his ear.

“His name is Kalb!” says Kurtze cheerfully.

“He, like, named his dog, _Dog_ ,” says GARYL, sounding deeply entertained.

“Imaginative,” says Taako. He eyes the distance the boy is keeping between them, and decides to take the approach that works with cats. It’s also, incidentally, the technique GARYL used on Taako and Lup when they were little, namely: ignore them and bank on them getting curious.

“So,” he says, off-handedly, starting to stroll down the street without looking back. The boy follows him, still keeping his distance. “Why is everyone scared of me?”

The boy is silent, and Taako wonders for a moment if he’s run off. But then he appears next to him at hip level, and silently reaches out his hand for him to take. Taako frowns but takes the offered hand. Kurtze tows him off, back towards the centre of town.

“Where did you come from?” Kurtze asks, “Papa says you don’t have a truck. He doesn’t understand how you walked here.”

“I flew,” says Taako.

His eyes go to every shuttered window and barred door compulsively, wondering if Lup could be behind any of them - feeling as always the huge, nebulous weight of the statistical unlikelihood, barely kept at bay by grim determination.

Kurtze laughs, “You can’t _fly_.”

“Can too,” says Taako. Kurtze’s hand is _tiny_ in Taako’s. It feels like Lup’s, in his dreams. Taako squeezes the little hand gently, half muscle memory, and gets a firm, knuckle-squishing squeeze back.

Kurtze laughs and skips forwards happily, towing Taako along. “Have you been other places?”

“Oh, you know. I’ve been around,” says Taako.

“Oh,” says Kurtze, then hesitantly, “I just wondered...Have you seen my sister?”

Taako stops dead in his tracks. “What?”

“My sister,” presses Kurtze. He looks at Taako, and Taako sees himself staring back in Kurtze’s huge dark eyes. “Saji. She’s missing. Mama and papa say that she got lost, but they won’t look for her. I don’t know why they won’t look for her.” Her eyes well with tears. “So I wondered if you had seen her.”

Taako is quiet for a moment before he gets out, “What does she look like?”

“Just like me!” Kurtze says, “Except dumber, with long hair.”

“What age is she?” Taako asks, as Kurtze starts moving again, pulling him along impatiently.

“Nine,” says Kurtze, “I’m ten, which means _I’m_ boss. But she never did what she was told.” He sighs heavily, with the air of one long-suffering.

“I’m a big brother too, y’know,” says Taako, aiming for offhand.

“Is your sister annoying too?” Kurtze asks

Taako laughs, “The most.”

“I miss her,” Kurtze says suddenly. “The men came and took her away but she’ll come back, right?”

“I’m sure she will,” says Taako, in a remarkably confident voice, considering he feels like the bottom has just dropped out of his stomach. “In fact,” he goes on, apparently without any of his higher brain functions engaging, “I’m looking for _my_ sister right now! And that means I’m going _all over_ Zakhara. I’ll look for Saji at the same time, how about that?”

Taako is glad there are no witnesses to the event of an undernourished ten year old boy _flattening_ him.

He wheezes as Kurtze tightens his tiny arms around his waist and struggles up to a seated position from the ground.

“Come on pumpkin, careful with the merchandise,” he mumbles, rubbing his ribs.

Kurtze is crying, big tears dropping off his chin, and Taako looks away quickly. “You’ll really look for her?” Kurtze says, “You promise?”

“I promise,” Taako says. Knowing he shouldn’t, knowing he will. He holds out his pinkie out, on reflex, on muscle memory, and Kurtze grins through his tears and locks pinkies with him.

“Now,” says Taako, “Are we going somewhere or what? I’ve got appointments to keep, little man.”

Kurtze is easier distracted from his misery than Taako is from his. He gets to His feet, takes Taako’s hand, and begins to trot along beside him again.

“Mama and Papa said you were a bad man, but I knew you couldn’t be! Your hair and coat and umbrella are too pretty, bad men are never pretty.”

“Mmm,” Taako laughs, “Uh, maybe you should work on that instinct kid, it’s not a great one. Lots of bad, pretty men out there.”

Kurtze makes a dismissive noise, and Taako smiles in spite of himself.

What a fucking sap, he thinks. How many kids were there in Zakhara without brothers and sisters and parents? Was he going to offer to find every one?

 _Well why not?_ says the voice in his head that sounds annoyingly like Lup. _A family reconciliation programme? There has to be precedent for that._

One thing at a fucking time, maybe. Get Lup back first, then he can fix the wrongs of the world. Or better yet, she can, and he can go back to guzzling margaritas and tinkering with Farspeech OS code.

Kurtze pulls him into the town square, right into the centre, where a past bomb has obliterated a well and torn apart most of the central stone work. The square is completely empty.

Taako resists a little. “There’s nothing here,” he says, “Are you punking me? Kid, I don’t have the time.”

Kurtze frowns at him, pulls more insistently, and then they’re round the edge of the well, standing over an abandoned, un-detonated shell casing.

It’s covered in dirt and debris, but the letters TV are unmistakable, white against the black casing.

“You said,” says Kurtze, “You said _Tee Vee_.”

Taako goes cold all over, from head to toes, as if he’s just dived into the ocean on a winter day.

 _Someone is going to pay for this_ , he thinks clearly into the sub-zero rage swirling around his head.

A scream breaks the silence of the courtyard and Kurtze starts in his hand.

“ _Kurtze!”_ shrieks a woman from the edge of the square, a baby in her right arm, her left stretched out towards them.

Taako has to pity this poor boy’s parents. Their child runs around befriending the first terrorist with a nice-looking umbrella to cross his path, and apparently regularly plays on un-detonated bombs. Lup’s got similar survival skills and he knows _he’s_ prematurely aged from it. He pulls Kurtze back to the edge of the square and into his mother’s fierce embrace. The mother looks over Kurtze’s shoulder at him with a wary, unreadable expression.

Taako gives her a tight smile and a nod, then turns and makes his way back to the shell.

“Sir!” the woman cries out, “There’s a bomb! We don’t go there!”

Taako waves over his shoulder in acknowledgement, without turning back.

Once he reaches the bomb, he settles down next to it, crosslegged. Its a model from about fifteen years ago: cheapish, designed to damage resources rather than people - storehouses, weapon depots… fresh water supplies. Taako shakes his head in disgust and pulls his rucksack off his back. Inside, among the discarded food packets and the micro water generator - still churning away, removing moisture from the air and storing it in the bottles lining his bag -  is a very rudimentary tool set.  It’s enough to get him access to the casing, with enough elbow greece and patience. The sun moves overhead in the sky, and by the time he’s fully defused the bomb a crowd has formed around the perimeter of the square. He stands up, shakes out the cramps out of his legs, and ignores the the lightheadedness and nausea brought on by sitting for hours in the afternoon sun.  His forehead and the bridge of his nose feel burned.

“It’s defused!” he shouts, and his voice jangles round the square mockingly. “It’s safe!”

Kurtze’s father steps out into the square, and crosses over to where Taako is standing.

“It’s safe?” he asks, his brow creased and heavy with worry.

“It’s safe,” says Taako. “There’s no physical way for that thing to go off anymore, short of nuclear fission.”

Kurtze’s father gives him a sideways look that Taako can’t read. He assumes it’s probably confusion.  “It’s completely safe!” Taako insists, “Look!” He kicks the bomb with his boot and it skids across the ground.

Kurtze’s father just about leaps out of his skin, but relaxes when there’s a noticeable lack of face melting or other explosive limb-loss.

“Forgive me,” the man says, “My eldest child died. A bomb, just like that-” he trails off.

Taako feels like he might vomit and has to swallow down hard.

All these years his sister had thought she was _helping_ people. They both had. Why had they believed the politicians? Why hadn’t they paid more attention? And hadn’t he just been thinking about how much he would like to ignore all this and go back to day drinking and making money?

Taako, despite what the tabloids might print and his peers might believe, has actually had moments of doubt and self-hatred before. He doesn’t have the brain chemistry required for anything less that bombastic daytime self-confidence and quiet, night-time reflections on worthlessness. But he has never in his entire life felt as disgusted with himself as he does now.

“Are there any more?” he asks, dreading the answer.

Taako is a philanthropist only in name and monetary donations. It’s not that he’s a _bad_ person. He does his part, he recycles, votes democrat, holds fundraisers and donates generously to Causes. But he’s never had any kind of emotional need to _do the right thing_.

He doesn’t know why he spends the rest of the day disarming explosives instead of finding Lup. He could have outsourced it - the bombs haven’t gone off in all the time they’ve been there, it’s unlikely that one more day will make a difference. But it’s _his responsibility,_ just as much as Lup is. These shells have his name on them, the lives they’ve taken are a direct result of his actions. There should be accountability for this, he thinks. _Someone_ has to take accountability. And he’s the only one here.

So he works into the gloom of evening, with Kurtze’s father leaning over his shoulder, watching his progress. The man’s name is Nidir, and he is a quiet, efficient assistant, who follows the process surprisingly well. As they lose visibility in the evening gloom, the umbrastaff illuminates and diffuses the area with warm rose and deep violet light. Nidir looks at it curiously but says nothing. It grows cold, and Kurtze’s mother, Rih, brings them out blankets. Taako doesn’t have the heart - or the grasp on Midani - to explain that he’s perfectly warm on account of his magic coat, so he works steadily into the night with the blanket slung over his shoulders.

He disarms nine shells in total. The town of Phandolin has been sitting on _nine_ un-exploded bombs, scared to let their children play or go about their daily lives, or drink water from their well.  His _fury_ \- at himself and Lup for their complacency, at whatever bastard has been selling their weapons behind their backs, and at whoever has been using them to terrorise innocent civilians - grows teeth and claws as the night waxes on.

Last of all, he makes his way back to the defunct well in the centre of the town, and rigs up his water-generator to its brick wall. It’s solar powered and should last the village a good long time - they won’t even need to pull the water up, a turn of the tap will suffice.

Nidir watches his work thoughtfully. When Taako’s finished, Nidir puts an arm around his shoulder and, with similar forcefulness to his son, tows Taako back to his house. It’s a very different welcome to Taako’s first day here. The house is packed with people and warmth and food. His weak protests that he should really get going are shouted down, and third and fourth helpings of food are heaped on him. These people know how to make rice go an awfully long way. He drinks sweet, spicy tea and listens to Kurtze - who has claimed the space next to him proudly - talk at length about his dog. Kurtze and his family are the only ones who seem to have a good grasp on English, but Kurtze is happy to translate the other adult’s questions: how did he get here? Where did he come from?  Who is he? The only person uninterested in Taako’s origin story is Nidir, who seems to have come to his own conclusions. Taako, for his part, evades the questions as best he can. Kurtze is an excellent co-conspirator in this plan, as he really only wants to talk about how funny Dog the Dog is when he tries to chase his own tail. The only thing Taako does reveal is that he’s looking for his sister. He asks if they have any information - they don’t, but they seem apologetic about it.

“I _told_ you he wasn’t a bad man,” says Kurtze to his father, “He says he’s going to look for Saji. He’s going everywhere looking for _his_ sister, and he says he’ll look for Saji too!”

Rih looks at her husband, brow creasing and Taako gets the sense there’s something going unsaid. Nidir nods solemnly to Kurtze, “You were correct, he is a good man.”

Taako feels a little nauseous at that, but he doesn’t argue, just stared fixedly down at his tea. Lots of people have called him a _good man_ in his life. He has hundreds of useless trophies with his name plaqued on them that agree with the sentiment. He’s never felt so thoroughly miserable in response before.

The night is bright and sweet, and it takes a while for Taako’s guilt at staying so long to overcome the way the cheer and kindness of these strangers warms and settles his heart.

 He eventually makes his excuses and extricates himself from the party, and after one last hug from Kurtze, and one more promise to come back to see his goats, he makes his escape.

He’s barely made it ten steps, before Nidir catches up to him, and pulls him behind a ruined wall.

“Your sister,” Nidir says, voice low and rushed,  “She was taken by the Ten Rings. They are a group that terrorises this area. If she is being held, it will be somewhere within fifty miles of here.”

Taako’s heart leaps, “How do you know?”

“There are rumours - a rich Faerunian woman is being held. That she is an engineer, that she is making them weapons.”

Nidir’s dark, serious eyes meet Taako’s without judgement.

“Lup would never make them weapons,” says Taako, worrying the hair tie around his wrist. More accurately, Lup would tell them to fuck off with as many expletives as possible. The thought makes his heart beat in his ears. “She’d never want anyone getting hurt from something she built.”

Nidir frowns, then says hesitantly, “But you are Taako Taaco, no? Those bombs you diffused today. They were built by you and your sister.”

“We didn’t know-” says Taako, uselessly, fingers twisting, “We didn’t realise that they were getting into terrorist hands! We thought we were helping!”

Nidir does him the decency of not pressing further. Maybe some of the horror that’s taken up residence in Taako’s soul is visible in his eyes

“How did you know who am I?” asks Taako, “No one else seems to know who or what _TV_ is.”

Nidir gives him a look of indulgent amusement. “Our town was not always so desolate, Taako Taaco. And our people have not always been so disenfranchised. Before the regime change I was a physicist. I worked for a university. I saw your keynote speech in Vienna… I’m afraid you were rather drunk at the time, but I enjoyed your explanation on optical technologies. I believe we even met briefly.”

Taako feels his worldview tip sideways and shatter on the ground. He gapes at Nidir for a hot minute, “I’m.. Sorry,” he says finally, “I didn’t recognise you.”

“Why would you!” Nidir laughs, clapping Taako on the shoulder. “It was a different time, a different place. And you had drunk an awful lot of champagne.”

“I do do that,” mumbles Taako.

That keynote speech is a blur in his memories. He remembers that it happened, just. He thinks he remembers arguing with Lup about their outfits - something about pink and green clashing. That’s just about it.

“I apologise for my wariness when you first arrived in the village, my friend,” says Nidir. “I thought it likely that you would bring trouble with you, with no regard for others’ suffering. I can see that I misjudged you.”

“You didn’t,” blurts Taako. “There was no, uh, misjudging. I’m not a good person, I’m just- I’m just taking responsibilty for my shit, yaknow? This is on me- Or, me and my sister, anyway. I _looked_ at the design for those bombs, I’m sure I did. I _approved_ them. And then I got richer when we sold them to _terrorists_ , and that’s not okay! That’s not good person behaviour, that’s shitty idiot behaviour, it’s not okay!”

“You offered to look for my daughter,” says Nidir quietly. “That is not shitty, idiot behaviour.” He sighs deeply, and looks up into the starry night sky. “But you are correct. You made a mistake, and it is up to you to fix it. I am just glad that you can see that.”

“Well,” says Taako with an awkward shrug, “I’m looking for Lup anyway. It doesn’t cost me anything to look for your kid at the same time.”

“I appreciate your offer, my friend,” says Nidir kindly, even as his eyes go grave and sad. “But Saji is dead. We did not wish Kurtze know the truth, or see her body, lest he act rashly.  She was killed by the men that took her. Such acts of violence are… Common, here, as of late.”

Taako opens his mouth, and nothing comes out.

“I’m- I’m so sorry,” he croaks, eventually. He feels cold and numb. He’s never felt further from home.

Nidir nods slowly, “As am I. But I am grateful for your work here today. I am grateful that you sat with us, that you have given my village water, and a place for the children to play. I hope you will return in happier times.” He smiles slightly, “You should bring your sister, we would be glad to meet her.”

“She’d love to meet you too. I’ll- we’ll come back, I promise.”

“I was glad to make your acquaintance again, Taako Taaco,” says Nidir with a broad smile.

“And yours, Nidir, uh-”

“Nidir Yinsen,” Nidir smiles, “Until next time, Taako.”

***

Taako makes his way back to the barracks after his breakthrough in Phandolin. Now he knows the name and general location of the group responsible for Lup’s abduction he can fine tune his search algorithms. He pulls back the entrance flap to the tent, already planning the exact coding he’s going to use, and is just storing the umbrastaff and robe safely away when GARYL says in his ear: “Sazed is calling.”

Taako thinks maybe Lup’s misgivings infected GARYL, because he’s always carefully neutral about Sazed, as opposed to Rosey, who he razzes on constantly.

“Hey babe!” says Taako, flicking a glance over his monitors before collapsing on his bed. He’s sure he was able to stand a few moments ago, but something about the sight of an actual, honest-to-god bed has short-circuited any further impulse to stand.

“Hey Taako,” says Sazed, voice warm with humour. “How are you holding up?”

Sazed has kept up his nightly phone calls to Taako. Even when Taako’s been in the middle of the search and rejected the call, Sazed just called back later. Taako would probably find it annoying if Ren or Rosey did it - their concern has a claustrophobic quality to it that Taako has taken to avoiding, over the past few months. Sazed, on the other hand, never makes him feel like his concern is Taako’s problem, which Taako deeply appreciates - he has enough problems right now. And besides, it’s nice to have company sometimes, on the long flights in the dark, when he otherwise would have nothing but the umbrastaff and his own spiralling panic for company.

“You know me,” says Taako, “I’m holdin’.” He scrambles over the side of the bed for his laptop, reaching grotesquely far with his arms to avoid getting off the bed. “How’s things back at the ranch?”

“Oh the same, all that bit more boring for not having you two around to liven things up.”

“Well,” says Taako, grinning, “You shouldn’t need to go without us for much longer! I got a lead today! I’m gonna find her, Sazed. I know who I’m looking for!”

He has his laptop booted up in moments and starts to construct code, diverting attention away from his conversation with Sazed and into his algorithm. GARYL’s already started the code for him; it just needs fine-tuned. He gives the camera on his laptop a grin and blows it a kiss. GARYL winks back with the camera light.

Sazed is busy telling him how amazing the news is, that he shouldn’t have buried the lead! Damn, he sounds excited. Taako wonders vaguely if Lup will give this guy a chance once she’s back, with how worried he’s been, and how much support he’s given the company, not to mention Taako.

Sazed rings off fairly soon afterwards and Taako codes deep into the night. His last moment of awareness is the sensation of his hands sliding limply off the keyboard, and the deep comfort of his pillows, as he slips into unconsciousness.


	5. Chapter 5

Taako is sitting on a lounge chair, on the balcony of their parent’s summer house, in the baking heat of Goldcliff. Their father is out of town, and Taako’s stolen the opportunity to paint his nails purple, with tiny silver stars stuck to gloss. He’s endured their mother’s pointed comments and disgusted sighs, which he far prefers to whatever response their father would muster, were he here. The long and short of it is, he doesn’t care how much Lup whines at him, he’s not getting in the pool. He can swim whenever he likes, his opportunities for nail polish application are much more limited, and he’s not risking his stars for a goddamned thing, least of all Lup’s attempts at recreationally drowning him. Beneath him, Lup divebombs and phoons, trying to get the water to hit the first floor balcony, and whenever she gets a breath, she calls up to him, telling him he’s a coward, that she’s won the phoon contest by default, that she’s Queen of the Phoons now, and he is but her lowly servant. He ignores her, and focuses on their mother’s magazine, which he stole last week but hasn’t had a chance to read until now. The MET gala was last weekend - their parents went, wearing a boring old tuxedo and an even more boring black dress - and Taako is desperate to see the lineup, the _spectacle_. He turns the page on Liv Tyler wearing a crop top that looks like she made it herself with craft glue, and feels suddenly as if there is a terrible weight sitting on his chest, stopping air from reaching his lungs, and simultaneously, as he hunches over and heaves oxygen into his chest, the knowledge that the pool has been quiet for three long, long minutes crashes into him like a-

Taako is sitting in the back seat of his father’s Cadillac Eldorado. His mother and father are arguing in the front seat, but quietly, and the noise is so familiar to Taako that it sinks out of his awareness like white noise. The lights on the freeway are bright refracting lines of amber, they reflect in his unfocused eyes, and he watches vaguely as the mechanical stars of the interstate blur across his vision. Beside him, snoring gently, is Lup. Her face is squished against his arm and she’s drooling on him - Taako wrinkles his nose and makes a note to make fun of her for it later. It’s a little too cold in the back of the Eldorado because their mother is smoking out of the open window, and the hairs on Lup’s arms are all stood up, casting tiny shadows over her goosefleshed skin, stark and magnified in the oscillating amber and black light of the street lamps. Garyl’s been gone two years now, they don’t know where, but they still have the quilt he gave them for their birthday, and they still take it with them more places than their mother would like. It’s slipped off Lup’s lap onto the floor. He strains to reach it, to cover Lup’s cold arms, but can’t quite reach. He unclicks his seatbelt, and reaches down, and-

Taako is sitting in the passenger seat of Lup’s Corvette, and she’s grinding through gears, faster and faster, grinning wild and free, and that’s not right. He’s sitting in a fancy upscale restaurant in Neverwinter’s banking district, eyes glazed-over as some schmuck from the city lectures him about dividends as if he isn’t a literal CEO, as if he doesn’t make millions of dollars in dividends every year. The french onion soup is terrible and he hasn’t deigned to take more than a sip, when suddenly his arm is _alight_ with pain, burning fierce and cold enough to make him drop his spoon onto the marble table with a clatter, and there’s a pressure over his chest in a diagonal band, cutting into his stomach, his chest, his neck, and-

Taako is in none of those places.

Taako is sitting in a cave, and the ground beneath him is cold and hard. It’s dark all around, so dark his eyes don’t know what to do with the lack of input. He and Lup studied this, during their optics phase. Eigengrau, or ‘brain grey’ - the lighter shade of black that your brain perceives in complete darkness. It’s something to do with the way the brain processes contrast, rather than inherent colour. It means that the clear night sky, devoid of light pollution - a sky Taako has become more and more familiar with, over the past ten months - is perceived as pure black not because of it’s darkness, but because of the stars webbed across it. Pure darkness, on the other hand, is perceived as a mid-tone grey - #16161d if Taako remembers correctly. And it’s not just colour that brains have difficulty processing in solid darkness. The solid grey of the cave buzzes with visual noise, like static on a television, and Taako feels all the rest of his senses stretch out desperately, repelled by the shifting, impenetrable world around him.

Taako is sitting in a cave, and he doesn’t know how he knows this information.

His fingers, outstretching, find sharp rock under him, pressing cruelty into his fingertips. There’s an ache in his stomach, sharp and deep, but when he presses his hands there, there’s nothing to feel. He slides his right hand sideways instead, on an instinct, on pure muscle memory, and finds identical fingers with his own.

Lup heaves a gasp, and coughs, “Koko? Are you there?”

“Where else would I be?” Taako whispers.

Lup slouches sideways into him and clutches his hand so tightly that her nails rake the backs of his knuckles. She’s moving raggedly, her breaths are deep and horribly liquid. She coughs and he hears something spatter on the ground. “Well, you know. I hear Hawaii’s nice this time of year,” she says, and her voice sounds like debris.

“Lulu?” Taako asks, and his voice sounds terribly small. “Lulu, I’m coming. But you gotta wait for me, okay? You gotta stay. Just stay here and I’ll come find you. Just like always, yeah? You get us into trouble and I get us out of it. Offense, defense.”

“Offense, defense,” Lup hums. “Just like always.”

There’s a long silence. Taako counts the seconds between Lup’s breaths stretch longer and longer. He can’t move except to squeeze Lup’s hand, tighter and tighter. The darkness presses down on him, relentless like grey stone.  He can feel her pulse and his in time through the tips of his fingers.

“Taako?” Lup breathes.

Taako hums. The ache in his stomach is awful, it feels like it’s going to swallow him.

“Don’t let go,” say Lup. Her voice is cracked with tears.

“Never ever,” he says, turning his head into her long hair. “And you.”

“Never ever,” Lup murmurs in return. Her head tips off his shoulder. Her body goes limp against his.

There’s a terrible tipping sensation, as if the world around them has jerked off its axis. He feels Lup tilt away from him and holds tighter and tighter and _tighter_ , even as she is pulled away by a force that is unrelenting, unpitying, and _inexorable_. The only thing he can feel of her is her hand, holding his, one bright spot of pressure in an awful void of nothing. The rest of her, her singed hair, the bony angles of her body, her warmth and her voice, all gone - only their hands, his right, her left, locked together with all the force Taako possesses, with all the love and devotion in his heart, in Lup’s heart, because they are _indivisible_ , they are two halves of one whole, and he will not allow _anything in this world_ to take his sister from him.

 ** _“My_** _sister!”_ he thinks, he _screams,_ into the vacant, uncaring grey. “ _Mine! **My** family! **My** twin! **My** **heart**!”_

There is an _explosion_ of light so bright that it blinds him, sends him reeling, mistaking the light for heat, but he still doesn’t let go. If anything, he digs his heels in further.

 _“You don’t get her.”_ he half-thinks, half-sobs. _“Never ever ever. Not without me.”_

And when he cracks his eyes open again, the disorientating, pitching movement has stopped.

Taako and Lup’s clasped hands are wrapped in cords of light, brilliant and luminous as stars. The rest of their silhouettes are demarcated with light, bound together by chains of light that form a net between them - so tight and secure, that Taako feels he can breathe out.

The last thing he sees is Lup’s face, alight with the white glow of the bonds. Her eyes are closed, as if she were asleep.

***

Taako wakes up and heaves over the side of the cot, vomiting stomach acid and bile onto the canvas floor. He’s shaking from head to toe, his sweating hand is clasped tight around the handle of his umbrella, and he can’t see for tears.

“Taako!” says GARYL immediately, turning on the lights.

Taako can’t speak through the sobs that choke him, hysterical and punishing.The sense memory of Lup’s hand slipping from his is ghastly in a way he can’t comprehend, awful beyond words or sense. His stomach aches _horribly_. He stumbles from the bed, barely missing the puddle of vomit, and hears GARYL as if from a long way away: “Taako, TAAKO! Listen to me, breathe!”

“I’m breathing!” Taako chokes, “ _Fuck!”_

“Taako, what’s wrong?” asks GARLY, panicked.

“Lup’s- Lup’s hurt. I dreamt Lup was hurt.”

“It was a dream, Taako! It wasn’t real!”

“Not real,” Taako mumbles, over the ache in his stomach and the crushing sensation in his chest.

He’s not remotely convinced. He’s had… _Hunches_ before. He’s felt water rising over his head, the phantom crack of his face off a car door, the suffocating line of a seatbelt he’s not wearing. He’s never examined it, the knowledge slips to the back of his mind when his head is clear and Lup is clear and safe. He knows it’s not possible, knows there’s no science to it, no sense. But he also knows that Lup has come within a breath of death three times in her life. And every time, Taako has known.

***

Taako stumbles out of the tent, throwing his red cloak over his shoulders haphazardly, leaving his boots unlaced. GARYL is in his ear advising caution and, “Not being a fucking idiot, Taako,” and Taako ignores him.

The base camp is just waking up, soldiers looking curiously at him as he tears past on his way out of the camp.

Taako doesn’t take off within view of the barracks. Given his recent experiences with the illegal distribution of his technology, he doesn’t want the military anywhere near his sister’s patented umbrella design, or his robe for that matter. Instead, he runs out past the tents at the furthest edge of the camp and out further into the desert, past a shelf of rock that emerges from the sand like the top of an iceberg.

Taako launches himself into the air, the umbrella propelling him upwards silently and without flare.

***

Taako follows his statistical likelihood vector north in the direction of the Sword Mountains. There’s a few areas that are flagging now that he’s factored in the Ten Rings known movements and locations. The Sword Mountains aren’t strictly speaking the highest strata of likelihood, but Taako remembers hard stone under his back and sets his course east without thought. He’s maybe halfway there when GARYL says into his ear piece, “Taako, you have to see this,” with an urgency that Taako is getting real used to hearing. They’d programmed GARYL to _have_ variable speaking patterns, but for the vast majority of their lives, the AI had mostly fallen into the smooth surfer drawl of his predecessor. Taako’s getting sick of hearing the sharp note of worry in GARYL’s voice over his earphones.

Onto the inside of his rose gold sunglasses slides a video clip, a birds-eye view of a town from above.

“I pulled it from one of our satellites,” says GARYL, “I’ve been paying close attention since you were there. There’s a militia moving in. Taako, they’re armed to the teeth.”

Phandolin looks even more desolate from above than it does from the ground. The crumpled buildings look like Taako and Lup’s fifth birthday cake after their father put his fist through it.

The tanks rolling through Phandolin are black and ugly against the pale sand, like fat, scuttling beetles. Taako stops in midair twenty feet off the ground and watches, frozen, his hair blowing loose around his head.

Seconds trickle by, then minutes. Taako watches as the tanks move into the town square, into which Kurtze had led him by the hand, and Nidir had helped him disarm a shell with Taako’s company’s logo emblazoned on the front.

There’s an explosion, a grenade fired from one of the tanks, and from Taako’s perspective it looks like a puff of flour, fluffing up after an enthusiastic dough kneading. The movement of the people appears agitated, even from above, like a disrupted ants nest. Taako wonders if one of them is Kurtze.

He whirls his umbrella around his fingers and points it east, and his body west. Then he’s moving, away from Lup, away from the Sword Mountains, towards Phandolin and whatever chaos it is that he’s brought to their door.

 It’s not quite an instantaneous decision. Taako’s brain works very fast, as a rule, and in the half second in which the heart-embossed metal of the umbrastaff spins through his fingers, he has plenty of time to weigh the risks, assess the potential for damage, and feel a terrible tearing sensation, deep beneath his sternum.

He doesn’t remember ever prioritising anything above Lup before. He is abjectly, riotously furious at the people who have made it necessary.

***

Phandolin is a little over 200 miles away and he reaches the outskirts of the town in a just under sixteen minutes. His eyes are closed and every iota of his attention is focused on the umbrastaff, willing it propel him forwards. He doesn’t notice GARYL beeping in his ear about ‘untested speeds’ until he breaks the sound barrier, his ears pop, and his arrival in Phandolin is preceded by a deafening, thunderous BOOM that rebounds back and forth between the open sky and ground.

Taako pulls into a dive.

The people of Phandolin are being marched out of their houses at gunpoint, children pulled screaming from their parents. Most of the town seems to be congregated in the square.

Taako lands in the middle of the open space.

“Mach 1, baby!” Taako crows into the silence. “ _Fuck_ yeah!”

In the movies, when lots of guns are suddenly pointed at the hero, there’s always a kind of echoing ka-schhhht noise, to signal that the daring idiot has landed themself in unsurprisingly deep shit. Taako’s kinda surprised when the reality is soundless.

The umbrastaff opens in front of him in a flash of fabric and Taako drops to a one kneed crouch, making himself small and umbrella-sized.

It occurs to Taako distantly, as bullets ricochet past and around him, that he isn’t aware of having thought _open_. He’d been distantly relying on the robe to work its bulletproof magic, and first and foremost, he’d been thinking about how once again, television has lied to him. He hadn’t been fast enough off the draw to even think about reacting - that doesn’t seem to have mattered to the umbrastaff.

The bullets stop, and Taako stands up again, swinging the umbrella over his shoulder nonchalantly.

“Are ya done?” asks Taako, into the new dusty silence of the square. “Points for trying boys, but my armour class outranks yours by approximately a bajillion. That’s the exact figure by the way, I calculated it myself and _fyi,_ I’m fucking great at maths.”

He swings the umbrella back out in front of him and as it parabolas through the sky, it lets loose misiles of energy that soar fast and true. Taako has a moment of breath-held awe for his sister’s brilliance. He can’t believe she’s found the solution to every ranged-assault targeting problem to ever occur in the technological warfare arena. No angles, no vectors, no statistical ratios. By virtue of the EEG mind-reading technology: Taako sees it, and the umbrastaff hits it.

The resulting firework display is truly spectacular. Violet misiles of soundless light weave between the innocent inhabitants of Phandolin and hit the militia members with extreme discretion, until there’s no threats left and Taako’s alone, facing a crowd of Phandolin townsfolk.

There’s a bit of an awkward silence.

“Soooo, we cool? Everybody cool? I hope so, this thing doesn’t come with a first aid feature. It’s a offense-only kinda shtick.”

Nidir moves forward out of the crowd and grasps Taakos forearm, pulling him in for a rough hug.

“You arrived just in time, my friend,” he says. “But I need your help. We can’t find Kurtze, he must have gotten lost in the attack.”

Even through the hurricano of anxiety and fear that has taken up residence in his solar plexus for the past ten months, Taako feels a new stab of worry at that.

“It’s not a big town,” he says, feigning well-worn confidence, “We’ll find him. Is everybody else okay?”

There’s murmurs of assent, people gravitating back towards their family members, and then, sharp and shocking, the sound of gunfire rips through the crowd again.

A man with a familiar face is standing at the edge of the square, his gun pointed at the sky.

It takes Taako a moment to work out why the face fills him with such familiar, gripping horror, before he realises that it’s been starring in a whole lot of his dreams recently - although in those, the gun is usually pointed at a bleeding, water-soaked Lup.

It’s the militia leader from the video.

Taako points his umbrastaff straight into the man’s stupid fucking face.

“It’s him,” says GARYL in Taako’s ear, “The man from the video release. Cyrus Roksikir.”

The man laughs. “Well, what do you know? She was right! You’re a long way from home, Taako Taaco.”

“Oh shit, am I?” Taako stares at him, eyes wide, smile manic. “ _Am I?_ Shit, I just went out for some fantasy fucking aspirin, **_DID I TAKE A WRONG TURN?_** ”

Taako is seething with a rage that is utterly alien to him: hot, wild, _incandescent_. This asshole _waterboards his sister,_ then stands in front of him with a goddamn grin on his face, like he thinks Taako won’t _vaporize_ him?

He’s going to take this man apart _atom by fucking atom_.

Cyrus laughs again, “Oh what a family resemblance! Your sister never knew when to shut up either.”

The past tense hits Taako like a sucker punch in the gut, which he ignores in favour of surviving the next few minutes. Lup’s not dead, he would know if Lup was dead.

 Cyrus is holding a device in his hand, a small metal box. Taako has spent his entire life in boardrooms, he has excellent situational awareness, and something about the way Cyrus is holding it sets alarm bells ringing in his head. Also, for a man with a magic umbrella pointed at him, he doesn’t look quite scared enough for Taako’s tastes.

Taako and Lup have faced down hundreds of mergers, deals and boardroom coups, they’re masters of confrontation and disassembling. This is the part of the showdown that normally features Lup throwing smack talk and distractionary tactics all over the floor, while Taako quietly tries to work out what the fuck is going on before it hits them in the face with the force of a freight train. Trying to do both at once is distracting and difficult, and Cyrus catches him darting a look at the device with a slow grin.

“You recognise your sister’s handiwork?”

“My sister wouldn’t build you shit,” says Taako immediately. It’s a fact. Taako is not a man of principles, he’s not sure that he wouldn’t build something for a terrorist if the alternative was dying horribly. But Lup’s survival skills aren’t good enough for that kind of tradeoff. She’d die rather than risk hurting innocent people.

Cyrus laughs - Taako is starting to get _real fucking sick_ of that noise.

“Oh you’re right, of course,” Cyrus says, “Ms Taako was _most_ unhelpful during her time with us -  typical Faeunian laziness, I imagine - no, she didn’t build us anything! She was very unproductive!” He smiles unpleasantly and continues, “Thankfully, she’s had her moments of use, in the past. Some even call her The Merchant of Death! It’s very fitting. After all, she really should have been more careful about who was buying her weapons! This, for example, you might recognise-” he holds up the device and waves it at Taako, “-The newest TV merchandise available! And we bought it - how do you Faerunians say it? - fair and square.”

There’s a beat of silence in which Taako hears his pulse in his ears. He rallies, with effort. “The Phoenix Fire Missile,” he says neutrally. “Gosh how much pocket money did that set ya back? Or was it an installment plan kinda dealio? You got the remote first and you’re still savin’ for the rocket propellent?” Taako stalls, playing for time as he reassesses. Cyrus is not a bluffing man. He is a man who is in full control of this situation, who has a plan, and who knows he’s going to be able to see it through. Taako has progressed from alarmed, to something that shares a kitchenette with actively frightened.

“Would you like for me to press it and we can all find out?” Cyrus asks genially.

“Press away homie!” Taako buoys his voice up with fake cheer.“You’ll burn a lot faster than I will.”

“Ah yes, the flying cloak. Does it also protect you from missiles? You know, your sister didn’t seem to want to talk about that stylish coat you’ve got there, although we asked her very nicely. She was much more forthcoming on that umbrastaff...Eventually.” Cyrus eyes the umbrella, and Taako spots a gleam of greed in his expression.

“She doesn’t know anything about the cloak,” says Taako over the rushing in his ears.

Cyrus laughs nastily. “Oh dear, I suppose she was telling the truth then. How unfortunate.”

“Where is she?” Taako asks quietly, so that his voice doesn’t crack.

Cyrus smiles sardonically, “Oh, I don’t think I’ll be telling you that.”

Taako points the umbrastaff at Cyrus’s face and pushes into it all his rage, his hatred, and his desperate desire to see the human being in front of him dead and unable to hurt his sister ever again.

And back through his palm, hot and sweaty against the wooden handle, Taako feels an impression of an idea press against his skin.

_Low Battery._

_Not the time!_ Taako pushes back against it.

Taako isn’t sure if he imagines the push back of _fuck you buddy_ across his palm, or the sense-memory of a firey purple firework show that exhausted the umbrastaff’s vast energy reserves, but he certainly wouldn’t put it past Lup to install the umbrastaff with a rudimentary AI and a bad attitude.

Honestly he’d be kind of dissapointed if she hadn’t.

Taako plays it off. If his father had taught him one thing, in the twelve years in which he’d failed at being a remotely acceptable parental figure, it was to never show your hand. “Or I could kill you right now,” he says, and he’s proud of how steady and offhand his voice sounds, “How about that? How about that thing I said?”

Cyrus grins, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you. I may not be a genius, but I know how to build a bomb. I’ve wired a dead man’s switch to my pulse! If my heart stops beating, so does everyone elses - isn’t that neat?”

“Yanno, if enough people hated me that I had to wear a suicide bomb at all times to stop them from _killing_ me, I might just take the hint and leave people alone,” says Taako thoughtfully.

“Ohh, I don’t wear it all the time! Just on special occasions. Like when I’m trying to convince people round to my point of view!”

“Is that what’s happening?” Taako asks, raising one eyebrow. “I thought you were just monologuing cause you’re a psychopath with no risk assessment skills. You _realise_ I’m going to kill you, right? You think a fuckin _dead man’s switch_ poses a problem to me? You think that elementary grade circuit-board physics isn’t something I could dismantle in my sleep? You kidnapped and tortured my _sister_. You’re dead, my friend. You’re body just hasn’t hit the ground yet.”

If nothing else, he’s succeeded in getting the asshole to stop smiling. Cyrus tilts his head to one side and considers Taako, the same way Taako’s seen snakes consider mice.

“Oh no, I don’t think so, Taako,” says Cyrus seriously. “I don’t think you want all these innocent people to die just because you wouldn’t play the game. You may be a spoiled Faerunian princeling, but I have a feeling that watching children burn alive is the kind of thing that might give you nightmares.”

If you know what people want, you’ll be able to predict their behaviour, and if you can predict their behaviour you can always stay a step ahead - another gem from the Taaco Sr. school of wisdom. Taako thinks he knows what Cyrus wants - what Cyrus has always wanted: Taaco Ventures technology. Now he has the Phoenix Fire Missile, but he’s still not satisfied. Taako has been flying all over Zakhara for months now; he was an idiot to think that nobody would notice. Just because he hadn’t found the people keeping Lup doesn’t mean that they couldn’t see him, or his unorthodox method of transport. Cyrus wants the umbrastaff, and he’s more than prepared to blow up Phandolin to get it. But would he really blow up himself?

“Just fyi, bud? This isn’t how you do negotiation.” Taako twirls the umbrastaff in his hand lazily. “If your ‘ _or else’_ includes: and they I blow up everyone, including myself, it kinda stops being a believable threat. You expect me to believe that this umbrella is more important to you that your _life_?”

“Oh I’m sorry, I wasn’t clear. The threat isn’t: give me the umbrastaff or I’ll flip the switch. The threat is: give me the umbrastaff, or for every minute you spend deliberating, I will shoot a non-essential part of that man’s body.”

And before Taako can move, or even think, Cyrus has swung his gun up, taken aim, and shot clean through Nidir’s left knee.

Nidir’s shocked shout bounces around the square, and Rih skuffs up dirt as she hurries to his side, landing beside him on the ground, her face close to his.

Taako rounds on Cyrus, seething, elbow locked as he lines the end of the umbrastaff with a point right in the middle of Cyrus’s forehead.

“Oh, careful!” says Cyrus, grin back in place, “Wouldn’t want to accidentally kill me!”

“Oh no,” says Taako through gritted teeth, “Perish the thought.”

“Now, Taako, we’re both businessmen! Let’s discuss this as professionals.”

Taako summons every ounce of composure at his disposal and lowers the umbrastaff. It’s not like it’s useful to him right now, and if deliberation helps him buy time to save Nidir’s other knee, then so much the better.

Cyrus smiles widely, “Okay? Excellent. Now, let’s-”

And then Taako hears a pop.

It’s a pop he first heard when he was five years old, and their father took them down into the private shooting range in the basement. “All arms manufacturers should know how weapons work,” Taaco Sr. had claimed. “If you’re going to _build_ guns, you need to know how to _fire_ a gun.” He had handed Taako the handgun first, because Taako was the first born son and that meant something to their father, even if it has long since ceased to have any meaning to anyone else in the world. The gun was fitted with a silencer, so that Taaco Sr could keep up a running monologue of criticism without having to shout over ear mufflers. Taako had raised one tiny, skinny arm and fired into the wall, missing the paper cut-out man by metres. Then, as now, he had been surprised by the understatedness of the

_Pop_

And how even though it was quieter than the average dog bark or car door closing, it still managed to freeze the world around it in one shining, deafening moment. Like a piece of glass falling slowly to earth.

Cyrus looks down at his gut, where blood has soaked through his tac gear with all the suddenness of a stop-motion animation.

He drops to his knees in one jerky, immediate moment. Behind him, Kurtze is standing with a gun in his hand, having just picked it up from one of the fallen men lying prone in the sand.

“Your men killed my sister,” he says. There’s tears on the curves of his round cheeks but his voice is steady and _old_. “You put a bomb in my street, and it killed my brother. You leave my papi alone, right now.”

Cyrus laughs, and then coughs, and blood hits the sand darkly. “I killed his sister too,” he says, nodding at Taako, “You don’t see him shooting me, for all his threats.” He catches sight of Taako’s face at that. Taako can’t possibly imagine what it looks like right now. He doesn’t know what any part of him is doing right now. He feels like he’s flying apart in all directions, like the missile has already arrived.

Cyrus grins, coughs again, looks straight into Taako’s face. “She called your name when she died, you know. She really thought you were gonna make it in time.”

And then there’s a whistling scream in the air, loud and high, causing the dogs huddling behind the walls to whine and bark. Taako sees: Kurtze, standing with the gun held loosely in his fingers, a slight crease between his eyebrows. Nidir, arms outstretched towards his son, his mouth an O of horror. Cyrus, limp, limbs like a cut marionette. He feels heat in the air, hotter than engines and welding guns, hotter than the Zakharan sun.

The umbrastaff moves in his sweaty hand, first a light tug, and then he’s yanked off his feet backwards, so suddenly and unexpectedly that his brain can’t begin to process it. All he knows is that he’s flying, his arm stretched out behind him, the umbrastaff handle hot as blood under his palm. The back of his legs hit something hard, a wall that catches the crook of his knees and flips him backwards and down, down, down. Then he hits the ground and everything is dark.

***

Taako wakes at the bottom of a deep well, the umbrastaff wedged uncomfortably under him. He thinks his wrist is probably broken - it throbs in time with his pulse.

He takes a moment to reflect on the absolute, abject _shittiness_ of this situation, and how desperately, horribly his life has gone wrong in the past year, to the point where he’s now found himself at the bottom of a well with an umbrella, a broken wrist, and fuck all else.

Taako’s brain cycles for a while around all the things he could have done differently. He could have seen Kurtze sooner, noticed that he was creeping quietly up behind Cyrus. He could have taken out the militia members with a less showy, power-intensive move. He could have never gone to Phandolin, never brought down the fires of hell upon a tiny unassuming town, that had already suffered more than enough under the carelessness of Taaco Ventures. He could have stopped Lup from going to Zakhara, or noticed that their munitions division had a back door the size of a freight train, through which their weapons were being sold to terrorists.

There are a lot of things Taako could have done differently. And they all add up to one thing: this is all his fault. From beginning to end, this is on him. Well, in fairness, Cyrus did his damn best. Cyrus had picked Phandolin as the venue for the showdown, knowing that Taako had been there before, knowing - maybe - that someone in the town was responsible for Taako targeting the Ten Rings, for his circling closer to the place where they were holding Lup. He knew that Taako would come, and Taako did, like a stupid, reckless idiot with a hero complex. If he’d just _stayed away,_ what’s the worst that would have happened? Probably not the wholesale destruction of Phandolin. Probably not a _massacre._ He feels the circuitous, angry thoughts settle on him like dead weight. This is on him. This is his fault, and there’s nothing he can do to change it.

And Lup is-

Lup is not dead. It is literally impossible for Lup to be dead. Taako is a twin, before he is anything else. Before he’s a businessman, a showman, a surfer or a gymnast. Before he’s an inventor or a philanthropist or a fashion icon. Far before he’s a son, or a friend, or even a person in his own right,  he is a brother. He is Lup’s _twin brother._ If he’s not that, he’s nothing. So Lup’s alive, because she has to be alive. Because there is no frame of reality in which Taako can be alive without Lup.

He stands slowly, painfully upright. The umbrella isn’t broken, somehow, but his wrist definitely is. It’s pointing in a funny angle, like the curve of a fork, the same way it did back when his father threw him across the room, age seven. He remembers the doctors saying that there was a higher chance of it re-breaking in the future. At the time, he’d been worried about how it would affect his handstands. Now, he’s worried about how he’s gonna climb out of a well with one arm out of action. He’s worried, too, about what he’s going to find when he does reach the top of the well. He wishes desperately that he’d never come to Phandolin, that he’d never come to Zakhara, that he’d made Lup stay in the fucking Goldcliff beach house with him, and they’d gone to the gala, and stumbled home drunk and had leftover pizza on the beach.

“Well, wish in one hand spit in the other, right GARYL?” he says, ripping open his backpack and pulling out a rope. “Wish in a hand in spit on it. Classic, classic.”

There’s no response, which is concerning for the not inconsiderable number of seconds it takes for him to troubleshoot the problem: his ear piece has fallen out and is lying, half-buried in the sand. Taako brushes it clean as best he can, given that every other part of him is also encrusted with sand, and sticks it in his ear with a grimace. He slips on his sunglasses too, even though they’ve been scratched to the back fuck of beyond by their sand bath,

GARYL is predictably tail spinning. “Taako? Taako, are you alright? Can you hear me? Dude, I don’t have a visual on you. Dude! Say something!”

“GARYL, please find your chill!” says Taako, attempting to tie the rope around his backpack and umbrella with one hand. “Have you checked under the fridge? Sometimes it rolls under there.”

“…What?”

“Your _chill_. You _appear_ to have _misplaced_ it. In a different time continuum, perhaps. I know I programmed you to have chill.”

“Y’know, I hate to say it, but I don’t think your stress testing on that particular bit of code was thorough enough, because this gap year situation is really, really, not working for me, or my chill.”

“Amen to that,” says Taako, with his teeth clamped tight to the other end of the rope. “Hey listen, maybe I have scurvy. Is that possible d’ya think? I don’t know what the signs of scurvy are, but I’ve been out here for what feels like 13 fuckin years and I’m- how would I know if I have scurvy?”

“Well,” says GARYL, in a voice closer to that of his normal tones, “ Uh, what are your symptoms?”

Taako surveys the wall of the well. The stones are uneven, worn away in parts. Thankfully they’re dry, but there’s sand piled in tiny drifts that Taako just knows is dying to slip him off the wall and plunge him to his sandy demise. Sand is also not to be trusted, is what he’s learned out here these past few months. He’d had his suspicions from the outset, but now he’s sure: sand is a terrorist in its own league of cruelty.

“Uh. Bored?” Taako says, “I’m really bored with just- all this. And sand taste? Or, the sand’s really more of a fully-body experience. It’s everywhere, my dude. I know you’re an AI, and I know that precludes you having sand up in your junk and in your- fucking _ear canal_ , but trust me when I say that full-body exfoliation is horrible and _terrible_ and should be _outlawed_ by the Geneva convention along with most of the other _shit_ that has been going on out here. Darth Vader knew what he was talking about, let me tell you. Sand is the worst.”

“Hey little man, I believe you. But maybe the sand taste isn’t really our most pressing concern here.”

“You leave the problem prioritisation to me, I-Robit, our pressing concern is sand if I say it is.”

“What’s your move, Taako?”

Taako makes a noncommital humming noise. “I think I just live at the bottom of this well now.”

“Would you like the best route map up the wall?”

“That would be nice, yes.”

Taako’s rose-tinted sunglasses suddenly overlay his vision with a purple glowing line, tracing the best route up the wall.

He leaves the backpack and umbrastaff on the ground, and ties the other end of the rope to his belt. This is going to be difficult enough without carrying an umbrella, even if it would be A Look. He steps close to the bottom of the wall, looks up, and pauses. The well is maybe 60 feet deep, he fell a long fuckin way - he’s honestly surprised all he broke was an already-jinky wrist. He can only assume that the umbrastaff slowed his descent somehow. He has no idea _how_ \- it’s still out of battery and even if it hadn’t been, he’d given it no instruction to relocate him to the bottom of the nearest hole in the ground. It’s possible that Lup installed some kind of prime directive in the umbrastaff, similar to GARYL’s (“1. Protect Taako Taaco and Lup Taaco from harm.”) He doesn’t think so, though. It would kind of go against what he understands about the underlying mechanics of the umbrastaff. It’s essentially an EEG interface with variable power output, if it had an _agenda_ he imagines that would fuck with the EEG element, placing an unexpected variable into the Taako’s head -> Taako’s hand -> Umbrastaff pathway.

“Hey GARYL, you didn’t tell the umbrastaff to yeet me into the well, did you?” Taako asks.

“Nooo?” says GARYL, drawing the word right out in his SoCal drawl, “Didn’t… you?”

“Nope!”

“That’s… Concerning?” says GARYL, without sounding particularly concerned.

“For sure,” says Taako, “But for now the weird things that are saving my life are allowed to stay. We haven’t got room for any prejudice on this boat. If the umbrella wants to help me out, I’m not gonna argue with it. Not sure I’d win, anyhow.”

GARYL hums in agreement and Taako reluctantly starts off up the wall. It’s difficult not to use his right hand, unnatural in the way that it unbalances his body. He ends up using his injured hand to keep his balance, even though it hurts to put pressure through the tips of his fingers. It’s a bright, unpleasant pain, but honestly it’s still not worse than the sand situation so he ignores it for the most part.

Taako is left handed, after a fact. He actually remembers being ambidextrous as a child, annoying Lup by switching off hands between sentences when he was writing. Lup, aggressively right handed, explored the world sticky-fingers-first, and was always up to her elbow in dirt or machines. That left her left hand free for dragging Taako into whatever messy nonsense she’d managed to generate. He and Lup held hands a lot as children (and adults, but that’s a whole other chapter of codependency), and he supposes that after a while, his right hand was relegated to hand-holding-duty.  Then their father broke his wrist and that was the end of any dubiety, Taako was left handed. Nowadays his right hand is for holding martini glasses, driving stick shift, grabbing Lup by the scruff of the neck when she gets fighty, and… Well. Holding the umbrastaff, now that he thinks about it.

It’s slow, painful going, made worse by the fact that in spite of trekking around the desert for 10 months, Taako is apparently in the worst shape of his life. He’s exhausted after the first ten feet, and by the next ten it’s taking him a concentrated effort of will just to move his arms and legs.

“Why-” Taako pants into the hot, dusty wall, “-Is this so _difficult_?”

“I imagine because you’re malnourished, dehydrated and chronically, severely sleep deprived.”

“That was actually a rhetorical question?” Taako bites back, “So like, uh, fuck you?”

“You can’t treat your body like trash and then expect to be able to levitate out of a well, dude,” says GARYL, with a hint of told-you-so snippiness.

“I’ll treat my body however I like,” snarls Taako, “My body is an ungrateful little bitch, remind me to eject my consciousness into a more deserving container at the next available opportunity.”

“I’ll stick it on the agenda.”

“You- You do that.”

Sweat drips down Taako’s forehead into his eyes, his hair is wet on his face, sticking to his neck. His wrist, hand and arm are all screaming with pain. His legs have started to full-on jitter, as if by standing on tip-toe he’s activated some kind of electrical current that’s making his whole lower body do an exhausted, frantic bounce.

He gets about halfway up - 40 feet from the ground, the readout on his glasses helpfully tells him - before he slips. He’s stretching one leg up and out, trying to find purchase on the rock that’s lit up under the purple guide light of his sunglasses. As he does, the toe of his left foot - currently wedged onto a narrow, sloped outcrop of a brick slips - suddenly on the sand, and skids erratically down the wall by inches. His right hand, clenching automatically, screams with pain and loses its grip. Taako is left hanging from the wall, with one hand and the traction of his shoe treads the only roadblock between himself and destination: sandy death. Taako whines under his breath and digs deeper into the grit at his very centre. He’s a survivor, he’s always been a survivor, and he is not going to be killed by a _well_. If he’s going to be murdered, it’s going to be by something _sentient_ at the very fucking least. Not by a shitty collection of rocks, that don’t even do the job they’re designed for!

He clenches his teeth, holds his breath, and puts all of his faith into one last push. He shoves off with his feet, pulls up with his left arm, and gets the toe of his right foot jammed into a shallow indent in the wall. He wriggles his toe into the crumbling brick to get better purchase, then pushes off again, hard, and launches his left foot blindly in the direction of a foothold. It catches, and Taako sags against the wall, heaving.

“Fuck.”

“Are you okay?” GARYL asks, after a beat. He sounds strange - if he were human, Taako would almost have said it sounded like GARYL had been holding his breath.

“Very much no!” Taako replies, grinning a little madly.

His legs are really going for it now, he’s just about bouncing up and down on his toes. He’s a gymnast and a surfer and he’s black belt trained in mixed martial arts, because when you’ve got infinite money why not do things that keep you fit and healthy, especially if you fill the rest of your time with alcohol, caffeine and all-nighters. But he’s never been a climber, and he hasn’t built up the specific muscle strength required to hang off a wall for an extended period of time. His muscles are overstretched and he’s hit a wall of fatigue.

Mechanically, he reaches one arm, then the next, one leg, then the next. He keeps his right wrist as steady as possible, he keeps his head down, he keeps moving.

Up and

Up and

Up.

He keeps his eyes on the wall ahead of him, one hold at a time, ignoring the drop below, ignoring the expanse above.

When his left hand punches out into free space it actually takes Taako a moment to process why, and then he’s scrambling up and up, getting his knee  under him and cresting the lip of the well, knocking fragments of stone off of the wall and as they hit the ground they-

_Plink_

And Taako looks up.

He’d expected devastation, fire and brimstone, collapsed houses, fatalities and injured survivors. He doesn’t know why he’d expected that. He knows what the Phoenix Fire missile does, saw Lup’s initial designs, all the way from the drawing board, to fabrication, to the briefings with the Faerun military in which Lup spoke of her invention in glowing, proud tones. Maybe the reality, at the bottom of the well, would have been too much to face.

Taako falls forwards and lands on his knees, onto reflective black glass.

Rih and Nidir. Kurtze. All of Phandolin. Even the dog called Dog.

All gone.

“What have we done?” Taako whispers. Even that sounds too loud.

Sand has started to blow across the glass, tinkling against the dark surface.

He stays like that a long time, staring down into his own dark reflection. His fingers are bleeding and calloused, and they rest on the reflection of identical fingerprints.

“GARYL,” Taako asks again, _“What have we done?”_

He levers himself to his feet. His fingers leave cloudy smudge marks on the ground, like a phone screen, like the hob in his kitchen.

“Lup thought there was merit in a bomb with limited fallout. An alternative to nuclear weapons. This way, if it came down to the threat of nuclear war, there would be an option that wouldn’t wipe out all of humanity. A clean bomb.”

“Right,” says Taako, nodding, “Right, that tracks, okay. So then- So why did we then **_SELL THEM TO TERRORISTS?_** ” The shout echoes and reverberates off the glass. Taako feels achingly, desperately alone.

“I don’t know Taako,” says GARYL quietly. “Someone at TV has been making money on the side. I promise you, I’ll find out who.”

Taako buries his face in his hands and screams, long and loud, until his voice runs out. Sometimes, you just gotta scream.

He lays a quick hand on the handle of the umbrastaff, and is greeted by the impression of low battery again, although this time he thinks it feels a little subdued. He heaves a sigh, tucks the umbrella into the pack, and swings it up on his shoulder.

Then he starts to walk in the direction of Wave Echo Cave.

**Author's Note:**

> all complaints can be filed directly to umbralitch.tumblr.com
> 
> all the thanks in the world to mysunfreckle for betaing. for putting up with all of my nonsense, you are truly a goddess among women


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